Really good piece from Huffington Post, it's well worth reading the whole thing. And of course the federal officials at the meeting were unresponsive and condescending, one of them telling a mayor he should run for Congress:

CHICAGO -- Near the end of a two-day summit here that brought together mayors and federal officials to talk about city design, the mood turned confrontational.

It started when Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter, in the middle of a Friday discussion on the federal government's role in city development, turned toward the Washington officials who were sitting with him on stage and expressed his disappointment.

"Mayors could never get away with the kind of nonsense that goes on in Washington," he said. "In our world, you either picked up the trash or you didn’t. You either moved an abandoned car or you didn’t. You either filled a pothole or you didn’t. That’s what we do every day. And we know how to get this stuff done.”

That evidently hit a nerve, as cheers erupted through the Grand Ballroom of the Hilton hotel, where many in the audience were mayors. Manny Diaz, former mayor of Miami, who sat on stage with Nutter, gave an impromptu speech criticizing Washington lawmakers. Other mayors stood up and took the microphone during the question and answer session -- not to ask questions, but to get things off their chests.

The event, co-sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts, the American Architectural Foundation and the U.S. Conference of Mayors, became, for a few minutes, a forum for mayors to express a difficult truth: Two-and-a-half years after the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, the nation's cities still struggle with chronic budget gaps that can't easily be filled. Tax revenue has plunged as property values have fallen and payrolls have shrunk. Local governments, many of which are legally required to balance their budgets, have made cuts that a few years ago would have been unthinkable.

Municipal budget woes stem partially from crises on the state level, which in turn aren't helped by a lack of federal assistance. Federal dollars from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act covered less than half of states' combined budget shortfall during this fiscal year, according to a recent report from the nonpartisan Center for Budget and Policy Priorities. Come next fiscal year, which for many states begins this July, states' combined shortfall will exceed $110 billion, with only $6 billion in federal aid available, according to the report.

That leaves cities out in the cold, as states focus on solving their own problems. In Newark, aid from the state of New Jersey fell by 40 percent between 2008 and 2010, contributing to a budget crisis that eventually prompted the city, one of the country's most dangerous according to FBI data, to lay off 13 percent of its police force late last year. In Milwaukee County, a community that has contended with a decade-long erosion of bus service, a transit cut in the coming state budget could deal a critical blow to the region's public transportation.

"We get the brunt of what the recession really entails. We're also the last to come out of that," Ed Pawlowski, the mayor of Allentown, Pennsylvania, said in an interview after the panel discussion. "While the economy is getting slowly better, cities are still struggling in a significant way."

Mayors want federal money. They say they can put it to quick and efficient use, creating jobs and helping improve the economy from the bottom up. Nutter gave an example: He closed Philadelphia's crumbling South Street Bridge in 2008, initiating a two-year repair project that was completed on budget and a month early last fall, he said. But federal funds are running dry, as Washington lawmakers have become seemingly obsessed with a desire to cut the federal deficit.

LOS ANGELES, CA.- The Museum of Contemporary Art presents Art in the Streets, the first major U.S. museum exhibition on the history of graffiti and street art, April 17 through August 8, 2011, at The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA. The exhibition traces the development of graffiti and street art from the 1970s to the global movement it has become today, concentrating on key cities where a unique visual language or attitude has evolved. Following MOCA’s presentation, the exhibition will travel to the Brooklyn Museum, where it will be on view March 30–July 8, 2012.

Art in the Streets showcases installations by 50 of the most dynamic artists from the graffiti and street art community, including Banksy (London), Fab 5 Freddy (New York), Lee Quiñones (New York), Futura (New York), Margaret Kilgallen (San Francisco), Swoon (New York), Shepard Fairey (Los Angeles), Os Gemeos (São Paulo), and JR (Paris). MOCA’s exhibition emphasizes Los Angeles’s role in the evolution of graffiti and street art, with special sections dedicated to cholo graffiti and Dogtown skateboard culture. The exhibition features works by influential local artists such as Craig R. Stecyk III, Chaz Bojórquez, Mister Cartoon, Robbie Conal, RETNA, SABER, REVOK, and RISK.

A special emphasis has been placed on photographers and filmmakers who documented graffiti and street art culture including Martha Cooper, Henry Chalfant, James Prigoff, Steve Grody, Gusmano Cesaretti, Estevan Oriol, Ed Templeton, Larry Clark, Terry Richardson, and Spike Jonze. A comprehensive timeline illustrated with artwork, photography, video, and ephemera will provide further historical context for the exhibition.


Art in the Streets feature several shows within the show. There is a special section dedicated to the Fun Gallery, which connected New York graffiti artists with the downtown art community in the early 1980s. Cocurated by gallery founder Patti Astor, the Fun Gallery installation features the work of Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and the graffiti artists who shaped the gallery’s history. A section dedicated to the seminal film Wild Style (1983), co-curated by the film’s director Charlie Ahearn, documents its influence on the global dissemination of graffiti and hip-hop culture. The exhibition also features a memorial presentation of Battle Station, a rarely seen work by legendary artist and theorist RAMMELLZEE, and a display of graffiti black books and other historic works from the Martin Wong Collection presented in collaboration with the Museum of the City of New York. A highlight of the exhibition is a Los Angeles version of Street Market, a re-creation of an urban street complete with overturned trucks by Todd James, Barry McGee, and Steve Powers.

The exhibition opens with a skate ramp designed by pro-skater Lance Mountain and artist Geoff McFetridge. Skate demonstrations by the Nike SB skate team will be held on Thursday and Saturday afternoons.

“Art in the Streets is the first exhibition to position the work of the most influential artists to emerge from street culture in the context of contemporary art history,” said MOCA Director Jeffrey Deitch.

“This quintessentially urban and dynamic partnership between the Brooklyn Museum and MOCA began with the 2005 Brooklyn-organized exhibition of the work of Jean-Michel Basquiat, the consummate American street artist of his generation; continued with the MOCA-organized © MURAKAMI in 2007, defining critical elements of worldwide street art; and now culminates with a groundbreaking exhibition devoted entirely to street art and graffiti,” said Brooklyn Museum Director Arnold L. Lehman. “The partnership has, in itself, provided a major record of public art over the past half century.”

Visit The Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) at : http://www.moca.org/

Source: Art News

THE MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART, LOS ANGELES (MOCA)

Founded in 1979, MOCA’s mission is to be the defining museum of contemporary art. The institution has achieved astonishing growth in its
brief history—with three Los Angeles locations of architectural renown; more than 14,500 members; a world-class permanent collection of nearly 6,000 works international in scope and among the finest in the nation; hallmark education programs that are widely emulated; award-winning publications that present original scholarship; and groundbreaking monographic, touring, and thematic exhibitions of international repute that survey the art of our time. MOCA is a private not-for-profit institution supported by its members, corporate and foundation support,
government grants, and retail and admission revenues. The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA is open 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday and Friday; 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. on Thursday; 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. on Saturday and Sunday; and closed on Tuesday and Wednesday. General admission is $10 for adults; $5 for students with an I.D. and seniors (65+); and free for MOCA members, children under 12, active military, jurors with I.D., and everyone on Thursdays from 5 p.m. to 8 p.m., courtesy of Wells Fargo. For 24-hour information on current exhibitions, education programs, and special events, call 213.626.6222 or access MOCA online at moca.org.

A house made Leo Berk an artist. It was a miraculous house. An impractical, leaky, flamboyant house made of steel ribs and gobs of discarded green glass and coal and wood and rope. This house is called the Ruth Ford House (great photos)—it was designed by not-quite-legitimate (in a good way) architect Bruce Goff (a onetime student of Frank Lloyd Wright) for the flashy artist Ruth Ford in 1950 in Aurora, Ilinois. So many people came to gawk that even attention-hungry Ford had to move out, and a series of owners followed. One of them was the Berks.

On the jump is the story of how the Ruth Ford House turned 6-year-old Leo Berk into the artist he is today, with pictures. Last month, Berk went back to his childhood home to live for a week, sleeping under his old skylight and making new art based on the formative place in a "residency" he invented for himself, with permission from the home's current owner, architectural historian Sidney Robinson.

So tell me about this residency you invented.

Well, I’d always stayed in contact with the owner who bought it from us in December 1987, Sidney Robinson. In 2001, I went and spent a couple of hours there and I started crying in front of him because it was just so overwhelming—I have a lot of experience tied up in the house. The house has changed his life in a parallel way to the way that the house has changed my life. Before he came to look at the house, he did not like the architect, Bruce Goff. He didn’t take him seriously, didn’t think he was anyone of importance. It is a really hard house to own in some ways. Before we sold it, we had had it for sale on and off for years.

You lived there how long?

Seven years, from age 6 to 13.

It was like negotiating the sale of an artwork instead of a house. The first thing my dad said was, the roof leaks, and Sid said, “I would expect it to.” And that’s the moment that my dad thought “Oh, we might actually have someone that’s going to buy this house.” The house is more sculpture than it is residence in terms of functionality and practicality.

How did your family find it?

I grew up in a tiny rural village in England, too small to be on the map. My dad worked for a construction machinery company, and he got transferred—my dad is American and my mom is British—to Aurora, Illinois, where the factory was. They sent my mom and my dad out to go house-shopping ahead of the move, and they looked for a house for two weeks and couldn’t find anything in their budget that they liked, and, like, the day before they left, they drive past the Goff house.

My dad sees it from the back seat out the corner of the window and sees the for-sale sign and the real estate agent tries to talk him out of it, but he wanted to go. And my dad then said that was the house they were going to buy.

My dad is a very practical person, but with these moments of spontaneity—and that was one of them. They decided to buy the house right then. I think it was in maybe foreclosure? It was in very bad shape, and they bought it for not a lot of money, and my dad did a lot of work on it to get it livable. So it was one of those moments that completely changed the trajectory of my life, I believe. I honestly don’t think that I would have been an artist had I not lived in the house. I don’t actually know what I would have done, but I don’t think I would have been an artist. That house shaped me, and that’s really what I was trying to think about when I was there, was how architecture can really shape someone, how it can transform someone in a positive way.

When were you there? Did you sleep in your old bedroom?

The dates were March 22nd to the 29th. Yeah. I had two bedrooms in the house, and I slept in both. One of them I shared with my brother when we first moved there, and one of them was when my brother wanted more space and I wanted my own room—there really are only two bedrooms in the house—so I moved to the balcony which is kind of an interior balcony. So I had a room with no walls that was in the center of the house and this skylight, it’s like a 25-foot diameter skylight and that was just basically the ceiling to my room. So I slept there one night [last month]. Sidney left me in the house alone for two days and one night, so that night I slept out in the open, basically, in the middle of the house.

What were you thinking would happen?

I woke up from a dream [months ago] about the house where I had an idea for an artwork having to do with the house —

Could you remember the artwork?

Yeah, I did. And actually I don’t know if I thought of the artwork after I awoke or while I was asleep, it was kind of in-between. But that’s not how I usually think of artwork. I thought, I could go back and make a whole show about the house. I’ve always talked about how the house has influenced my aesthetic, but I thought why not make a show that is directly about the house and how it shaped me and how architecture can change people.

So what are the hotspots in the house for you? What are the places that feel?

Well…there’s a lot!

The orange steel ribs are salvaged from World War II Quonset hut structures, they come together to make a skylight.

There’s the orange piano that came with the house, was made for the house, color-coordinated with the architecture.

There’s the floating stairs, these stairs that kind of climb up this I-beam.

There’s that central copper clad spire that is also the fireplace, and there’s all these structures in the house that—the way that everything intersects, all these pieces and materials, is really unusual. Like the floating balcony is almost suspended. The pie of the house, the interior/exterior part is separated by this 20-foot tall glass wall.

The exterior wall is made out of coal—this black masonry is coal. All the wood is cypress. On interior and exterior surfaces there are these World War II surplus hemp rope lines—navy surplus, so made to be exposed to the elements.

There are chunks of green glass interspersed in the coal. He sourced them from this plate-glass factory in St. Louis: They’d have their giant ladle for pouring out this glass, and then what was left in the ladle that didn’t come out, it would cool and then it would crack, and they’d take it out of the big ladle and put it into this giant pile of irregularly cracked chunks, and so that’s what the glass is.

And it goes all the way through, so when the sun is setting and the house is getting dark, these chunks of glass are shining brightly. In the evening and in the morning, it’s just, like, unbelievable.

There’s so much glass in the house that for privacy there’s these rubber and fig trees that are growing in planters alongside the glass. It’s really organic in the way that he created places for giant trees to be growing inside of the house, and you might see some growing into the skylight in different images of the central skylight.

In the bathrooms are these large terrazzo, cast-in-place tubs, and over them were round skylights salvaged from B-17 bombers—and the ceilings in the bathroom are rope that swirls around this B-17 bomber dome. While my family lived there, we managed to break both of the bathroom skylights, so that’s one of the projects that I’ve begun is finding replacements for those [working with the Museum of Flight in Seattle].

There’s a strip of neon that illuminates upwards at the herringbone ceiling. So that was a pretty innovative thing for 1949.

And there’s the radiant floor. That was what I was having the dream about.

It was kind of early on with radiant floor technology, so it had some kinks to work out and had these hot spots and cool spots. I have this memory of lying on the floor and trying to align myself with the hot spots watching TV.

What was the dream?

So when I went there I rented an infrared camera and I shot imagery of the floor. You can see hot and cool spots, so suddenly you can see where all of the copper pipe was inside of the concrete from heating the floor, and I shot imagery so that I could make something from that. My original idea was I wanted to make a rug with that image on it, the infrared image. That was my dreamt idea. I haven’t gone back to that piece yet, but so far that’s what I think I’m going to do. Just the memory of how that floor really defines the space in a way, like the cat would always sleep on the warm spots, and so you kind of developed a sense of the warm and cool spots on the floor in the house. So I went back and mapped them with this tool so I could depict them and really understand what was going on beneath our feet, too.

There’s not one opening window in the house. There’s just ventilation hatches all around the perimeter of the large dome and around the perimeter of the bedroom wings. There’s not one bit of drywall or plasterboard or anything like that, so everything has a material that is itself.

There’s concrete, cypress wood, rope, coal, glass, a little bit of painted wood but really very little of something that’s being altered as other than its real material quality. So that’s kind of like where I think I get a lot of my material sensibility as an artist, too.

Not masking things.

Right. All of the doors and, well, there’s very few straight lines in the house, so there’s these closet doors and cabinet doors that are all curving, so the craftsmanship in the house is insane.

When I went back, I just couldn’t imagine owning the house and having to maintain the level of the craftsmanship that the house was built to, it was really high. So I’m sure I get that from the house.

A lot of Bruce Goff’s houses have kind of, like, disintegrated, and this one has not—it really depended on who built them. He didn’t do a lot of detailed drawings. He really relied on the builder to figure out a lot.

I’d always known that this house was built by someone who studied under Bruce Goff for a little while, but I didn’t know that when he built the house he was 26 years old.

Wow. What’s his name?

Don Tossi.

So he was the general contractor and he was 26. And I know back in the 1940s, people grew up a little bit faster, but this still floored me that he did that when he was 26 years old. It was built for I think $60,000 and built in 17 months.

Did you and Sidney talk at all about the work and the show you’re working on?

Oh yeah. The three nights he was there, we went out to dinner and talked for four to six hours each night and had breakfast together on two of those mornings and hung out for at least three hours talking.

He knows everything about the house. He knows everything about prairie modern architecture. He knows everything about Bruce Goff. He’s a 67-year-old architecture professor who has a lot to talk about.

It was such visual and emotional stimulation from being at the house, from being back in this place, and then I got intellectual stimulation from this professor, from just talking about the place.

Have other artists worked at the house?

Stephen Prina shot a film in the house a few years ago. [The Way He Always Wanted It, 2009.] It premiered at the Tate Museum [London]. I haven’t seen it because I did write Stephen Prina a couple years ago wanting to see if there was a way that I could get the film to show at the Henry [Seattle], and he didn’t respond. Sid has even tried to get in contact with Stephen Prina because he thought he was going to be getting some kind of copy of the film, and Sid is not hearing back, either... I’ve had the film described to me, there are long, tracking, curved dolly shots in the house that are sequenced with live music being played in the house and Stephen Prina singing.

Do you know why he [Prina] chose the house?

Originally he just wanted a house that had a curve in it that could match this track that he had for this dolly. And then when he found the house, the piece started becoming more about Bruce Goff and about the house, and I think some of the lyrics he wrote for the song come from love letters between Bruce Goff and his lover. So it sort of became about the architecture and the architect.

There’s also a John Cage piece where you play the living room of a house, so Third Coast Percussion are going to be doing that on the 100th anniversary of Taliesin—I think it’s this summer. They’re making a video of that. I do have this idea that I could have a show about the house and also screen that Cage video and also the Stephen Prina film.

When you make work about the house, do you think of it as documentary or fiction?

Fiction. Fiction in that it’s my experience of the house, I’m not trying to make an objective depiction of the house. And so I did that infrared photography and then I also shot some videos there that were pieces that I thought of while there.

You’re a sculptor, even when you’re working on paper. Have you ever shown video before?

Yeah, I did, long time ago, when I was in the Bumbershoot show that Michael Van Horn curated. It was a video that I shot at the same time that I was going to the veneer mills and doing the veneer pieces. I set up a camera over the veneer conveyor and shot video of the veneer shooting past, slowing down, stopping, starting ,and then there’s steam coming out of it, so it’s kind of a seductive image. I did kind of a poor job of capturing that image and wished I had done better.

What were the ideas you came up with at the house, and why video?

I shot some videos that were just documentary, like I need to remember this. But then I shot one video that was just a moment, kind of like an epiphany moment, where you see something and it leads to all these connections happening in your mind.

Acoustically the house is insane, you can talk quietly and hear somebody all the way on the other side of the house because it’s a giant dome. At one point Sid started playing piano and I shot video right then.

What’s the next step for you?

Well the first thing I did was go to the Museum of Flight [looking for B-17 dome windows to replace the original skylights], and I edited these two videos, and Scott [Lawrimore] is working on exhibition possibilities for this show, because it’s not going to happen in his current space. I’d love to have a show in that space but this isn’t going to be it. And then, I want to make some sculpture out of some of these materials.

I forgot to mention the smell of the house, which is powerful and as soon as I cross the threshold of the door it’s the first thing that hits me. It’s this smell that I have never smelled anywhere else, and smell and memory are really connected. I’ve done a bunch of research on what that smell could be, and I think I’ve figured it out, and I’d like to get that into sculpture somehow too. There’s so many good materials, you know, to work with, that are associated with the house, that I just want to try out making sculpture with them, see if it looks good, see if I can do it. So that’s the next step.

In the house, did you dream?

Yeah, all my dreams happened in the house when I slept there. And I’m also not, like, a big rememberer of dreams, but all of the dreams I had, I remembered dreaming about the house. It’s one of these things where there’s a risk of sounding really corny and ridiculous when talking about the house because I’m not normally a person that—I’m pretty practical and not really someone that really gets caught up in sentimentality. Really, I usually don’t like artwork that is in any way nostalgic. But I have this belief that the house made me who I am, and that’s kind of a crazy thing to believe.

Most architects you talk to today would not give Bruce Goff much thought or kind of think that he was a wacko. And I understand that, because when you look at his architecture, it’s really different than the current convention of, like, white-walled glass boxes, really pared-down minimalism of today’s steel and glass. I wouldn’t be able to really argue with someone, with an architect, about whether or not this is good architecture, academically good, or theoretically good. But what I would be able to argue is that I lived in that house for 7 years and it changed my life for the better, and that seems like a pretty ambitious, amazing goal for architecture, and if that’s possible, then to me the house is really an enormous success.

I’ve been thinking so much about the house—it was built at the same time as the Mies in Plano. But that one is floating above the ground, and this one is sunken, literally, into the ground. That one is facing all outwards and this one is facing inwards into the center spiral.

There’s a not very good Goff house in Seattle. I think it’s on Queen Anne. I drove by it years ago and can’t remember what it looked like. He also composed music—he would compose player piano music directly to the roll, so not writing out music but actually cutting out little squares with an X-acto blade or whatever, each square, four sides, punching out these holes to be read by a player piano, so they have this visual character as well as this musical character. Creatively, he was kind of an enormous person.

How many residents have lived in the Ford house, and what will happen to it next?

It has been landmarked, so it’s protected, and Sid has set up a foundation to pay for any repairs into the future beyond standard maintenance. I think there have been 11 residents. It’s an experience. The house leaked like a sieve. I remember this Hills Brothers coffee can we had, that we put out to catch water—I found it in a closet when I was there, completely rusted. I recognized it right away.

^{All photographs by Leo Berk}

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Three years after an IKEA factory moved to the small blue collar town of Danville, VA, the international furniture giant has become the center of a union battle, racial discrimination complaints, and high turnover from disgruntled employees.

Workers at the Danville IKEA plant say they are forced to work at a frantic pace, participate in mandatory overtime — possibly facing disciplinary action for not showing up — and raises have been eliminated. Six African American employees have filed discrimination complaints, claiming that they were assigned to the least-wanted third shift and forced to work in the lowest-paying departments. Moreover, while making a profit of $2.2 billion in 2009 and a 7 percent sales increase in 2010, the hourly wage in the Virginia IKEA packing department was slashed from $9.75 to $8.00. Attempts at forming a union have also been thwarted by IKEA, as some of the 335 IKEA workers in Virginia signed cards expressing interest in forming a union with the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers. But, in response, IKEA hired the law firm Jackson Lewis — known for keeping unions out of companies — and workers were required to attend meetings where the management highly discouraged union membership.

A colossal difference exists between IKEA laborers in Sweden and Virginia:

	Vacation Days Per Year	Salary Per Hour
IKEA workers in Sweden	5 weeks off	$19/hour
IKEA workers in America	4 days off selected by workers, 8 days selected by management	$8/hour

But some IKEA employees work for even lower wages and have no benefits, as IKEA draws one-third of its workers from temporary-staffing agencies. These conditions have caused Bill Street, who tried to organize IKEA workers with the machinists union, to say that it’s “ironic that Ikea looks on the U.S. and Danville the way that most people in the U.S. look at Mexico.”

What’s more perplexing is that while busting unions and paying workers low wages, IKEA is owned by the world’s richest charity organization. The parent company of IKEA is the private Dutch-registered Ingka Holding, which, in turn, is owned by the tax-exempt, non-profit entity Stichting Ingka Foundation (SIF). With a mission dedicated to “innovation in the field of architectural and interior design,” the Economist valued SIF at $36 billion in 2006.

The net worth of SIF outstrips that of the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation — valued at $33.5 billion in 2009, a full three years after SIF’s conservative estimate of $36 billion. But its grant of only $1.7 million annually to the Lund Institute — “barely a rounding error in the foundation’s assets” — shows that SIF, technically classified as a charity organization, is not about good deeds. As a comparison, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation dispersed $1.645 billion towards curing the diseases affecting the world’s poor. Even more striking, the money SIF has acquired from IKEA, while in the tax haven Netherlands, is used “for investing long-term in order to build a reserve for securing the IKEA group, in case of any future capital requirements.” Whereas, the grants from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation are used to “improve access to advances in global health and learning.”

– Paul Breer

The year's best feature films:

1. The Social Network. Here is a film about how people relate to their corporate roles and demographic groups rather than to each other as human beings. That's the fascination for me; not the rise of social networks but the lives of those who are socially networked. Mark Zuckerberg, who made billions from Facebook and plans to give most of it away, isn't driven by greed or the lust for power. He's driven by obsession with an abstract system. He could as well be a chess master like Bobby Fischer. He finds satisfaction in manipulating systems.

The tension in the film is between Zuckerberg and the Winklevoss twins, who may well have invented Facebook, for all I know, but are traditional analog humans motivated by pride and possessiveness. If Zuckerberg took their idea and ran with it, it was because he saw it as a logical insight rather than intellectual property. Some films observe fundamental shifts in human nature, and this is one of them.

David Fincher's direction, Aaron Sorkin's screenplay and the acting by Jesse Eisenberg, Justin Timberlake and the others all harmoniously create not only a story but a world view, showing how Zuckerberg is hopeless at personal relationships but instinctively projects himself into a virtual world and brings 500 million others behind him. The Social Network clarifies a process that some believe (and others fear) is creating a new mind-set.

2. The King's Speech. Here, in a sense, is a first step in a journey that could lead to the world of The Social Network. Prince Albert (Colin Firth), who as George VI would lead the British Empire into World War II, is seen in an opening scene confronting a loudspeaker as he opens the Empire Games. He is humiliated by a paralyzing stutter. The film tells the story of how his wife, Elizabeth (Helena Bonham Carter), involves him with a rough-hewn Australian speech therapist (Geoffrey Rush), whose unorthodox methods enable him to eventually face a BBC microphone and forcefully inform the world that the empire is declaring war.

All of the personalities and values in The King's Speech are traditional (and the royal values are too traditional, the therapist believes). Tom Hooper's filmmaking itself is crafted in an older style, depending on an assembly of actors, costumes, sets and a three-act structure. The characters project considered ideas of themselves; The Social Network, in contrast, intimately lays its characters bare. From one man speaking at a distance through the radio, to another man shepherding hundreds of millions through a software program, the two films show technology shaping human nature.

A difference between them is that we feel genuinely moved by the events in The King's Speech. We identify. While some people may seek to copy the events in The Social Network, few, I think, would identify with those characters. Mark Zuckerberg is as much a technology-created superhero as Iron Man.

3. Black Swan. And now we leave technology and even reality behind, and enter a world where the cinema has always found an easy match: fantasy. That movies were dreamlike was understood from the very beginning, and the medium allowed directors to evoke the psychological states of their characters. Black Swan uses powerful performances by Natalie Portman and Vincent Cassel to represent archetypal attributes: female/male, young/old, submissive/dominant, perfect/flawed, child/parent, good/evil, real/mythical.

Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake provides a template for a backstage story that seems familiar enough (young ballerina tries to please her perfectionist mother and demanding director). Gradually we realize a psychological undertow is drawing her away from reality, and the frenzy of the ballet's climax is mirrored in her own life. This film depends more than many others on the intensity and presence of the actors, and Portman's ballerina is difficult to imagine coming from another actor.

4. I Am Love. In this film and Julia (2008), Tilda Swinton created masterful performances that were largely unseen because of inadequate distribution. Is it an Academy performance if no one sees it? Here, she easily clears a technical hurdle (she is a British actress speaking Italian with what I understand is a Russian accent), playing Emma, a Russian woman who has married into a large, wealthy, and guarded Milanese family.

She isn't treated unkindly, at least not in obvious ways, but she doesn't belong. She is hostess, mother, wife, trophy, but never member. Now her husband and son are taking over the family dynasty, and her life is in flux. When she learns her daughter is a lesbian, she reacts not as an Italian matriarch might, but as the outsider she is, in surprise and curiosity. She has heard of such things.

Now she meets a young chef named Antonio (Edoardo Gabbriellini), a friend of her son's. A current passes between them. They become lovers. There are many ways for actors to represent sex on the screen, and Swinton rarely copies herself; here as Emma she is urgent, as if a dam has burst, releasing not passion but happiness. She evokes Emma as a woman who for years has met the needs of her family, and discovers in a few days to meet her own needs. She must have been waiting a long time for Antonio, whoever he would be.

5. Winter's Bone. Another film with its foundation on a strong female performance. Jennifer Lawrence plays Ree, a girl of 17 who acts as the homemaker for her younger brother and sister in the backlands of the Ozarks. Her mother sits useless all day, mentally absent. Her father, who was jailed for cooking meth, is missing. She tries to raise the kids, scraping along on welfare and the kindness of neighbors.

When the family is threatened with homelessness, she must find her father, who skipped bail. She sets out on an odyssey. At its end will be Ree's father, dead or alive. Unless there is a body, her family will be torn apart. She treks through a landscape scarcely less ruined than the one in Cormac McCarthy's The Road. Debra Granik, the director and co-author, risks backwoods caricatures and avoids them with performances that are exact and indelible, right down to small supporting roles. Ree is one of the great women of recent movies.

6. Inception. A movie set within the architecture of dreams. The film's hero (Leonardo DiCaprio) challenges a young architect (Ellen Page) to create such fantasy spaces as part of his raids on the minds of corporate rivals. The movie is all about process, about fighting our way through enveloping sheets of reality and dreams, reality within dreams, dreams without reality. It's a breathtaking juggling act by writer-director Christopher Nolan, who spent 10 years devising the labyrinthine script.

Do dreams have an architecture? Well, they require one for the purposes of this brilliantly visualized movie. For some time now, I've noticed that every dream I awaken from involves a variation of me urgently trying to return somewhere by taking a half-remembered way through streets and buildings.

Sometimes I know my destination (I get off a ship and catch a train, but am late for a flight and not packed). Sometimes I'm in a vast hotel. Sometimes crossing the University of Illinois campus, which has greatly changed. In every case, my attempt is to follow an abstract path (turn down here and cut across and come back up) that I could map for you. Inception led me to speculate that my mind, at least, generates architectural pathways, and that one reason I responded to Inception is that, like all movies, it was a waking dream.

7. The Secret in Their Eyes. This 2009 film from Argentina won the Academy Award for best foreign film. But it opened in 2010 in the U.S., and so certainly qualifies. It spans the years between 1974 and 2000 in Buenos Aires, as a woman who is a judge and a man who is a retired criminal investigator meet after 26 years. In 1974 they were associated on a case of rape and murder, and the man still believes the wrong men were convicted of the crime. The whole case is bound up in the right-wing regime of those days, and the "disappearances" of enemies of the state.

Although the criminal story is given full weight, writer-director Juan Jose Campanella is more involved in the romantic charge between his two characters. No, this isn't a silly movie love story. These are adults -- experienced, nuanced, survivors. Love has very high stakes for them, and therefore greater rewards. Soledad Villamil and Ricardo Darin have presence and authority that make their scenes together emotionally meaningful, as beneath the surface old secrets coil.

8. The American. George Clooney plays an enigmatic man whose job is creating specialized weapons for specialized murders. He builds them, delivers them, and disappears. Now someone wants him to disappear for good. A standard thriller plot, but this is a far-from-mainstream thriller. Very little is explained. There is a stark minimalism at work. Much depends on our empathy. The entire drama rests on two words: "Mr. Butterfly." We must be vigilant to realize that once, and only once, are they spoken by the wrong person-- and then the whole plot reality rotates.

Few of my colleagues admired this film by Anton Corbijn very much. Most of them admired it very little. I received demands from readers that I refund their money, and messages agreeing that there was greatness here. The American reminded me of Le Samourai (1967) by Jean-Pierre Melville, which starred another handsome man (Alain Delon) in the role of an enigmatic murder professional. The film sees dispassionately, guards its secrets, and ends like a clockwork mechanism arriving at its final, clarifying tick.

9. The Kids Are All Right. There are ways to read that title: Kids in general are all right, these particular kids are all right, and it is all right for lesbians to form a family and raise them. Each mother bore one of the children, and because the same anonymous sperm donor was used, they're half-siblings. The mothers and long-time partners are played by Julianne Moore and Annette Bening, and like many couples, they're going through a little mid-life crisis.

Their children (Mia Wasikowska and Josh Hutcherson) unexpectedly contact their birth father (Mark Ruffalo), and the women are startled to find him back in their lives. It was all supposed to be a one-time pragmatic relationship. Ruffalo plays him as a hippie-ish organic gardener for whom "laid back" is a moral choice. He thinks it's cool to meet his kids, it's cool their moms are married, it's cool they invite him for dinner. I mean ... sure, yes, of course ... I mean, why not? Sure. In a comedy with some deeper colors, the film is an affirmation of -- family values.

10. The Ghost Writer. In Roman Polanski's best film in years, a man without a past rattles around in the life of a man with too much of one. A ghost writer (Ewan McGregor) is hired to write the autobiography of a former British prime minister (Pierce Brosnan) so inspired by Tony Blair that he might as well be wearing a name tag. He comes to stay at an isolated country house, in which everyone is a potential suspect. His wife, Ruth (Olivia Williams), smart and bitter, met him at Cambridge. His assistant, Amelia (Kim Cattrall), smart and devious, is having an affair with him. The writer comes across information that suggests much of what he sees is a lie, and his life may be in danger.

This movie is the work of a man who knows how to direct a thriller. Smooth, calm, confident, it builds suspense instead of depending on shock and action. The actors create characters who suggest intriguing secrets. The atmosphere -- a rain-swept Martha's Vineyard in winter -- has an ominous, gray chill, and the main interior looks just as cold. The key performances are measured for effect, not ramped up for effect. In an age of dumbed-down thrillers, this one evokes a classic tradition.

** ** **

Now for the second 10 best films. These are alphabetical because ranking films in order is pointless after a certain point. They're all worthy of your time.

All Good Things. In 1982, the wife of a New York real estate investor disappeared without a trace. In 2000, his best friend was found murdered. In 2001, he admitted he killed a neighbor and chopped her up, throwing the pieces away in trash bags. He said it was self-defense. The wife is still missing. No one was ever charged in the death of the friend. He is in jail for the admitted crime, with a sentence adjusted because the jury believed some self-defense may have been involved. All Good Things is based on fact.

The facts include the deep involvement of the man's father in operating real estate in the sleazy underbelly of 42nd Street. The father is played here by Frank Langella, smooth and dangerous, and the son by Ryan Gosling, whose marriage to Kirsten Dunst becomes a country idyll before his father all but orders him back to the city. Andrew Jarecki's film clearly insinuates what really happened, and reminded me of Barbet Schroeder's Reversal of Fortune, about the Sunny von Bulow murder. In both cases, what seems to be obvious pathology is impervious to logic.

Carlos came in two versions: one over five hours long, which I saw, and one closer to ordinary feature length, which most people will see in wider release or on cable. Written and directed by Olivier Assayas, a French filmmaker whose projects are usually more tightly focused, this is the epic story of the terrorist known as Carlos the Jackal (Edgar Ramirez), who operated in the years between 1975, when he led a raid on OPEC oil ministers in Vienna, until 1994, when he was betrayed by former comrades, arrested in Sudan, and returned to France for trial.

The film suggests that much of his behavior wasn't ideological in origin, but grew from megalomania. He kills for many causes, but the primary motive seems to be his own twisted ego, his need to dominate and enforce his will. Assayas uses an enormous canvas and many period locations to portray an elusive man who seemed for a long time to be immune to the law. Recently, from prison, he complained that this film is inaccurate.

Chloe. Atom Egoyan's film centers on Julianne Moore and Liam Neeson, as a Toronto married couple, and Amanda Seyfried as the young call girl who enters their lives. The wife, concerned her husband may be cheating, hires the prostitute to "test" him, and listens avidly to the girl's accounts of her life. Seyfried plays the title character as a powerfully erotic young woman with personal motives that are hidden -- from Moore, and from us.

Chloe begins as a film involving eroticism, takes the form of a thriller, and then undergoes a sinister transformation into the story of hidden motives that seem to flow counter to the apparent direction of the story. Egoyan is a master of the psychosexual, and here his sensuous character reproduces the feelings and doubts all three characters inspire.

Secretariat was one of the most thrilling and moving entertainments of the year, the story of the greatest racehorse of all time. Walking into the theater, everyone knew it would win the Triple Crown with the historic victory at Belmont. Yet the audience cheered anyway -- not in surprise, I think, but in exhilaration. Secretariat is a movie that allows us to understand what it really meant.

This isn't a cornball formula film. It doesn't have a contrived romance. It's certainly not about an underdog. It is a great film about greatness, the story of the horse and the no-less-brave woman who had faith in him. Penny Chenery is played by Diane Lane, and John Malkovich and Nelsan Ellis provide counterpoints as Secretariat's trainer and groom. The best general film of the year.

Greenberg. The hero of Noah Baumbach's film was years ago part of a rock band on the brink of a breakthrough. Greenberg (Ben Stiller) walked away from it and never explained why. He fled Los Angeles and became a carpenter in New York. Now he's back in LA, house-sitting his brother's house. His life isn't on hold; it's on stall.

His life is upended when he meets Florence (Greta Gerwig, in a career-making performance). She is on hold: just out of college and no job. She has health and abundant energy. She's happy with a purpose. On the other hand, we can't stand Greenberg. But we begin to care about him. Without ever overtly evoking sympathy, Stiller inspires identification. You don't have to like the hero of a movie. But you have to understand him-- better than he does himself, in some cases.

Hereafter. Clint Eastwood's film was the sort of inward, spiritual film he doesn't make; it considers the idea of an afterlife with tenderness, beauty and a gentle tact. It deals with a few characters who all have issues that involve an afterlife. Matt Damon plays a man who sincerely believes he communicates with the dead, but has fled that ability and taken a low-profile job. Cecile de France plays a newsreader on French television. Bryce Dallas Howard is a young cooking student with a fearful dark place inside. Richard Kind is a man mourning his wife. Frankie and George McLaren play twin brothers, one who is struck by a truck and killed.

The Damon character becomes the link between all of them. He seems to have an authentic power, though what it proves is hard to say. Nothing he says need come from the other side. There is a moment handled with love and delicacy in which he says something that is either true or isn't, but is a kindness either way. In that moment perhaps Eastwood is hinting that whether or not there is an afterlife, what we do in this one is what counts.

Monsters. Gareth Edwards' film is one where the aliens are truly alien. It is so effective precisely because it doesn't showcase them endlessly savaging the Earth. It makes them mysterious, sensed but rarely seen, their motives and even their forms incompletely glimpsed. Involving a journey from Mexico to the U.S. through an Infected Zone, where 50-foot-high spidery floaters pulse with an inner glow. It demonstrates that making aliens too literal robs them of their menace and reduces them to special effects.

The film stars Scoot McNairy and Whitney Able as a photographer and the daughter of his publisher. Not by nature compatible, they share a journey that itself becomes the film. It is through wastelands of desolation like those in The Road" Monsters are glimpsed but not understood. Then there's a breathtaking final sequence combining uncommon suspense and uncanny poetry, where their motives are made clear. Edwards evokes the awe and beauty he's been building toward, and we fully realize the film's ambitious arc.

Never Let Me Go. Mark Romanek's adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro's novel imagining a society within the larger one consisting of children who were created in a laboratory to be Donors of body parts. They know this and accept it. They live within a closed world whose value system takes pride in how often and successfully they have Donated. Carey Mulligan, Andrew Garfield and Keira Knightley star as three Donors now in their 20s.

This is a meditative, delicate film, directed sensitively, with actors who find the balancing point between their understanding of reality and ours. These poor characters are innocent. They have the same hopes everyone has. It is so touching that they gladly give their organs to us. Greater love hath no man, than he who gives me his kidney, especially his second one.

Rabbit Hole. Eight months after the death of their child, a couple remains frozen in sadness and uncertainty. Nicole Kidman and Aaron Eckhart are no longer sleeping together or, actually, feeling married. They try grief counseling and join an encounter group, which she rejects but he returns to. Sandra Oh provides an insightful performance of a woman who seems to have embraced recovery as a lifestyle.

The director is John Cameron Mitchell, adapting David Lindsay-Abaire's play. He treats this situation with respect, but with a certain redeeming humor-- not comedy, but the kind of deep good humor that can finally creep in late in a period of mourning as life begins to stir again. Kidman and Eckhart are well-suited: good-looking, confident people who suddenly are at a loss about how to live their lives.

Solitary Man. Michael Douglas in the kind of role he plays best, a sinner. His character was once a regional celebrity as "New York's Honest Car Dealer." That went wrong, but he's still as persuasive as-- well, as a good car dealer. In business, he can sense what car to put you in. In sex, he can sense what mood to put you on. He closes a lot of deals.

He cheated on his wife (Susan Sarandon). He disappointed their daughter (Jenna Fischer). He cheats on his companion, (Mary-Louise Parker). He uses the offer of his experience in life to charm a college student (Jesse Eisenberg) and then betrays him. Eventually he is back where he began in college, behind the same counter of a greasy spoon run by an old pal (Danny DeVito). Directed by Brian Koppelman and David Levien, this is one of Douglas' best performances.     

Overall, 2010 was not a great movie year, but it has many great movies. On my blog I'll write in more detail about the best in the categories below. Why categories? They provide a way to list more good films. If a "best film" list serves any purpose, it's to give you ideas.

DOCUMENTARIES

45365

A Small Act

Exit Through the Gift Shop

Inside Job

Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work

Last Train Home

Restrepo

Tabloid

Scrappers

Waiting for Superman

FOREIGN

35 Shots of Rum

A Prophet

Father of My Children

Cell 211

The Chaser

Fish Tank

Home

Mother

Vincere

White Material

THRILLERS

Book of Eli

The Bounty Hunter

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

Green Zone

Repo Men

Salt

Shutter Island 

The Town

Unstoppable

Stone

ANIMATION

Despicable Me

How to Train Your Dragon

The Illusionist

Megamind

Toy Story 3

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/PRNewswire-USNewswire/ - MetLife Foundation today announced the grant winners of its 2010 Museum and Community Connections program. The grants, ranging from $50,000 to $75,000 and totaling $500,000, were awarded to eight museums for imaginative exhibitions and educational and public programs that extend their reach into diverse communities and make art a part of people's lives. "MetLife Foundation continues to fund this program into its fourth year because we believe arts play an important role in helping people understand and appreciate each other and our world," said Dennis White, president and CEO of MetLife Foundation. "We have a long history of partnering with museums to support educational opportunities and are pleased to recognize these museums for their innovative and collaborative projects." The goal of this competitive program is to broaden arts programming and promote museums as centers of education without boundaries. Winners were selected on the basis of their potential to engage diverse populations in the arts, creativity and innovation, and commitment to community. Recipients are:

• The Bronx Museum of Art (Bronx, N.Y.) will co-present with Wave Hill, Bronx Calling, the first Artist in the Marketplace Biennial Exhibition, featuring 72 emerging artists in a multi-site initiative that will further broaden the museum's programs to new audiences and communities.
• The Chinese American Museum (Los Angeles, Calif.) will develop the Built in L.A.: Chinese American Architects exhibit and supporting educational programs, showcasing the architectural contributions of pioneering Chinese-American architects to Los Angeles' landscape from 1945 through 1980.
• The Guggenheim Museum (Manhattan, N.Y.) will move beyond its walls and onto the streets of New York City with Stillspotting NYC to explore concept of stillness in a restless urban landscape. The project, which includes walking tours and educational programs, will transform spaces in everyday life to highlight unusual sources of inspiration.
• The High Museum of Art (Atlanta, Ga.) will launch the High Teens Initiative, aimed at engaging teens from diverse ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds through small, in-depth programs, as well as larger, more social formats, including classes, workshops, summer programs, and evening social events.
• The International Museum of Women (San Francisco, Calif.) will lead an innovative global online exhibition and collaborative educational project, Young Women Speaking the Economy, in partnership with museums from across the globe. Through art, multimedia, blogging and public presentations, young women from Denmark, the Philippines, the Sudan, and the Untied States will join in a global dialogue on the key economic issues facing young women today.
• The Miami Art Museum (Miami, Fla.) and Miami Dade College's InterAmerican Campus will collaborate to present an exhibition by Brazilian artist Rivane Neuenschwander. The project will provide a diverse student body with unique access to the museum, its exhibitions, and Neuenschwander's work and in-person lectures on campus.
• The Museum of Fine Arts (Houston, Texas) will organize the Carlos Cruz-Diez: Color in Space and Time exhibit - the first large-scale, retrospective of one of the great Latin American modernists. The show, which will be presented bilingually and include a complete retrospective with artist interviews and unpublished theoretical writings, will travel both nationally and abroad.
• The National Museum of Mexican Art (Chicago, Ill.) will present the exhibition La Nacion Huichola, which examines the indigenous Huichol cultural of Western Mexico and relates it to local audiences through an array of public arts programs and partnerships with local public schools.

About MetLife Foundation MetLife Foundation was established by MetLife to continue the company's long tradition of corporate contributions and community involvement. Grants are made to support health, educational, civic and cultural organizations and programs. The Foundation contributes to arts and cultural organizations, with an emphasis on increasing opportunities for young people, reaching broad audiences through inclusive programming, and making arts more accessible for all people. Given the important contributions and educational value of museums, MetLife Foundation has awarded grants totaling more than $25 million in recent years to museums across the country. For more information, please visit www.metlife.org.

When we launched Boutique Homes, our motivation was to create a collection of striking architectural vacation rentals – properties that travelers would be inspired by and delight in visiting. Nothing epitomizes this vision more than the four Frank Lloyd Wright rental properties we found. For many, staying in a home designed by America’s greatest architect may be as close to the perfect vacation as they’ll ever get.

In his 70 working years, Frank Lloyd Wright was prolific. In all, he designed 1141 houses, offices, churches, schools, libraries, bridges and museums. A total of 532 were completed, and 409 of them still stand. Until recently, however, very few were open to the public. Nowadays, at least 50 buildings can be visited (including the legendary Fallingwater), and a handful can be slept in.

We have included four on our list. First, pictured above, is the Seth Peterson Cottage, designed in 1958, one of Wright’s last commissions. A small space, it was described by the late William Wesley Peters of Taliesin Architects as having more architecture per square foot than any other building he knew. It’s perched on the edge of a wooded bluff looking out over Mirror Lake, Wisconsin.

Next up is the Bernard Schwartz House (above and two below). In 1938, Wright was invited by LIFE magazine to submit a design for a typical American family home, a so-called ‘Dream House’.

The resulting design was eventually built for Bernard and Fern Schwartz in Two Rivers, Wisconsin. In 1971, the Schwartzes sold the home, and it was resold 33 years later to brothers Gary and Michael Ditmer, who now make it available for rentals.

Another property created by Wright is the Palmer House (top, and below). Built in the Fifties for Bill and Mary Palmer in Ann Arbor, Michigan, it was sold to Jeffrey and Kathryn Schox in 2009, who have recently turned it into a rental property.

The fourth is the Louis Penfield House in Willoughby, Lake County, Ohio (below).

Amusingly, the 6ft 8in Louis Penfield asked Wright on their first meeting, ‘Can you design a house for someone as tall as me?’ Wright, who was known to consider tall people as ‘weeds’, replied, ‘Yes, but we’ll have to design a machine to tip you sideways first.’

As a result, the ceilings are taller than most other Usonians (Wright’s name for the sixty family homes he built), and windows are tall and slender like their original owner. When Wright died in 1959, he had just completed designs for Penfield’s second home, Riverrock House, his last residential commission. It is yet to be built.

There are three other Wright rentals that we know of. The Duncan House (below) was built in 1957 in Lisle, Illinois, but can now be found in the Polymath Park Resort, in Acme, Pennsylvania. In addition to its own appeal, a big draw is its location, just a few miles from Fallingwater.

The resort is also home to three other homes, created by Wright’s apprentices: the Balter House and the Blum House by Peter Berndtson, and the Dream House by John Rattenbury. All are available for overnight stays.

Another Wright rental is the Muirhead Farmhouse in Hampshire, Illinois, a little northwest of Chicago. It’s the only farmhouse known to have been designed and built by Wright during his lifetime, and it remains in the hands of the same family as it was then.

In 2003, the house underwent extensive restoration, and the surrounding 757 acres of farmland are also being  re-developed. The land, renamed the Muirhead Springs Preserve, features native prairie wildflowers and grasses, as well as four-mile limestone trail for walkers, bicyclists and horse riders.

And finally, there’s the Haynes House (below) in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Built in 1952 for Mr and Ms John  D Haynes,  it has been restored beyond its original state. In other words, many of the 24 original items of furniture that Wright designed for it were never built, or were thrown out over the years, but the new owners have recreated them all (with the assistance of the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation).

If you’re a fan of Wright’s work, why not book an overnight stay in one of these homes? If you do, let us know how it goes. RM

Fotoweek DC continues to roll throughout the week with exhibits and events too numerous to count. Browse through the Fotoweek DC website for information on exhibit openings and closings, NightGalleries and their daily picks on the blog. If all of that is too much for you, feel free to refer to our picks for the remainder of the week.

>> Washington Project for the Arts celebrates 35 years with Catalyst, an extensive exhibit of the organization's history. Featuring works by over 100 artists, the exhibition celebrates the catalytic power of the WPA and the artists who benefited from the organization's support and encouragement. American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center. Opening reception on Saturday. 6 to 9 p.m.

>> Tonight at the Hirshhorn, meet artists Mario Garcia Torres and Cyprien Gaillard as they discuss their work on the "ruins of the 20th century" in the new exhibit Directions, which also opens today. 7 p.m.

>> In the WIP Lab at Artisphere, see FOLDING/UNFOLDING : COLLIDER. The exhibit, inspired by the gypsum crystals of the Naica Mine in Mexico, will present the geometry of basic crystal forms, and cutting-edge 3D modeling technologies in a fascinating intersection of art and science. Opening reception on Saturday. 8 to 11 p.m.

>> What happens when you have ten photographers and ten visual/street artists create art? Likeness at Honfleur Gallery answers that question with ten original portraits and ten interpretations of that portrait. Opening reception on Thursday. 6 to 8 p.m.

>> Food, friends and a slideshow? That's the idea behind Slideluck Potshow. Bring a dish to share and settle in for an evening of artists presenting their work in this casual, yet creative atmosphere. Friday, 7 p.m. $10.

>> On Thursday, the National Building Museum will be offering special tours of its historic home. Originally built in the 1880s as an office for the U.S. Pension Bureau, tours will highlight the history of the pension building, as well as architectural features designed to honor veterans and accommodate the wounded veterans as they navigated the building to collect their pensions. Five tours given throughout the day. Registration is not required.

>> Hamiltonian Gallery is hosting an artist talk with Renee Van Der Stelt and Elena Volkova in conjunction with their exhibits Recordings and Proofs, respectively. Tonight, 7 p.m. RSVP requested.

>> Foto Baroque opens tonight at the Curator's Office. View photographs by Victoria F. Gaitán and Cecilia Paredes and their interpretation of modern Baroque. 6 to 8 p.m.

>> This Friday, Hemphill Fine Arts opens an exhibition by Julie Wolfe. Wolfe's work explores the juxtaposition of life and death. Opening reception from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m.

>> Into the Quietude presents work by Lisa Rosenstein and James Halloran, who offer visual contemplation. Make time to reflect on this project by the Evolve Urban Arts Project this Saturday at the opening reception from 5 to 8 p.m.

Art Notes

• Photographers, have your work reviewed in a live critique this Saturday. The event, hosted by Civilian Art Projects, will have three of your images critiqued by a review panel based on How to Get Your Photography Published. 3 to 6 p.m. Registration: $25.
• Beyond the Singularity opens at Art Whino in National Harbor. Saturday, 6 p.m. to 12 a.m.
• Help support the Whitman-Walker Clinic at the Art for Life art auction. Bid on art in a live and silent auction. Friday, 6:30 p.m. Tickets: $100.
• Fashion with a Purpose is happening this Sunday with designer Tashia Senn. View Senn's Spring/Summer 2011 collection and help raise funds for the Cinderella Foundation. 2 - 6 p.m. Tickets: $150.
• Bethesda Art Walk is this Friday. Area galleries will stay open and showcase local, regional and international art. 6 to 9 p.m.
• Learn the art of bookmaking this Sunday. The Del Ray Artisians present this workshop where participants will learn how to make a small notebook. 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. $45 DRA Member / $55 for non-members.

CHICAGO, Nov. 10, 2010 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Leaders from three geographically diverse cities will gather in Chicago, November 14–16, for the fifth Sustainable Cities Design Academy (SCDA). Hosted by the American Architectural Foundation (AAF) in partnership with United Technologies Corpo

A very promising trailer for a documentary about a 250-year-old farmhouse in Japan that was restored by an American journalist and his adopted Japanese son.

“In Fall 2007, Princeton Architectural Press published ‘Minka: My Farmhouse in Japan,” the memoir of retired AP foreign correspondent John Roderick. Moved by the story of this remarkable house and the memories it contained, and with seed funding from the Graham Foundation, we began work on a documentary film about John, his adopted son architect Yoshihiro Takishita, and the 250-year old house they shared. John died in March 2008 at the age of 93. ‘Minka’ is a meditation on place, architecture, memory and the meanings of home.”

The movie, a production by two friends of mine at Birdling Films, is only available as a trailer right now here on Vimeo. But the filmmakers have launched a Kickstarter campaign to raise the funds to complete it — as of this writing they’re just shy of halfway to their goal of US$10,000. You can donate here and help get this done.

Elation causes depression. Most people hate depression but love elation. Nearly all depressed people have been obsessed with, or possessed by a burning desire to achieve. Just look at the list below for some idea. Please note however, this author does not agree with the "diagnosis" of Depression... THe cause of depression is elation - depression is the effect.

October 19th, 2010 Copied with Permission From Nursing Schools Blog

1. Douglas Adams: Following a professional split from writing partner Graham Chapman of Monty Python fame, Douglas Adams floundered from odd job to odd job until he went home for Christmas and ended up living with his mother for a year. Therapy proved a fruitless venture, but he managed to smooth his mind out somewhat by the time he started with The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

2. Woody Allen: Although his career's edgy heat has cooled somewhat as he grows older, Woody Allen's finest films served as a productive outlet for his depression. Wringing laughter out of the pain worked as a viable supplement to therapy.

3. Hans Christian Andersen: The beloved storyteller grappled with depression for a number of different reasons, most notably genetics, boredom and war. He penned his timeless fairy tales as a means of channeling some of the negative emotions what plagued him, most notably "The Snow Queen."

4. Charles Baudelaire: As with many immensely creative people, Charles Baudelaire found solace in writing his own poetry and translating the works of Edgar Allen Poe. He passed in and out of "spleens," or extended bouts with depression, throughout his adult life.

5. Ingmar Bergman: Legendary film director Ingmar Bergman considered his own works too depressing to repeatedly view and even ended up hospitalized following a complete nervous breakdown. An arrest on charges of tax evasion prompted the serious condition, and though the charges were dropped he spent the rest of his life panicking over its impact on his career.

6. William Blake: William Blake has garnered plenty of respect as a consummate writer and artist, but his brilliant works came at a price. Many came following vivid periods of hallucinations which prompted creativity, though once he spent the energy he would fall into severe melancholia.

7. Robert Burton: In 1621, Robert Burton published "Anatomy of Melancholy" based on his experiences and observations, laying a solid foundation for later psychological inquiry into mood disorders.

8. Raymond Chandler: One of the most iconic detective novelists channeled his cynicism and depression into the legendary fictional character Philip Marlowe. Unfortunately, he also turned to alcohol abuse and grew estranged from his wife as well.

9. Agatha Christie: The influential mystery writer once disappeared for eleven days in 1926 and turned up under an assumed name in an English hotel. Psychiatric professionals and biographers theorize that the incident was brought about during a depressive episode culminating in either a nervous breakdown or a fugue state.

10. Winston Churchill: These days, many people would balk at the idea of a politician with clinical depression or another mental illness, allowing prevailing stigmas to cloud their judgment as to what makes a solid leader. But Winston Churchill walked his "black dog" before, during and after his tenure as Prime Minister and still managed to pull the United Kingdom through World War II. They lost their hegemonic status in the process, but at least it wasn't to the Nazis.

11. Samuel Clemens: Better known by his pseudonym "Mark Twain," the last few years of the quintessential American writer's life were fraught with severe depression. The death of his wife and two daughters precipitated the emotional downfall.

12. Kurt Cobain: Kurt Cobain's grungy music captured the isolation and disillusionment of an outcast demographic looking for a voice, but his depression unfortunately also came saddled with grave substance abuse issues and suicide.

13. Leonard Cohen: Like many other creative types plagued with depression, the legendary Leonard Cohen channeled his pain into both haunting music and reckless behavior. After finding Paxil an inadequate solution, he turned to Buddhism for peace of mind.

14. Joseph Conrad: Throughout his life, the famed author of Heart of Darkness struggled with depression grave enough to cause physical illness. Much of it came from pressing doubts regarding his writing prowess.

15. Calvin Coolidge: Oppressive shyness, a father absent due to political work and the death of his son all contributed to the 30th American President's general quietness, withdrawal and depression.

16. Ian Curtis: The frontman of legendary post-punk outlet suffered from epilepsy and insomnia, and he self-medicated through various substances and suicide attempts. The stresses of a European tour and crumbling marriage eventually led him to hang himself in 1980.

17. Edgar Degas: One of the most influential artists of the 19th Century, Edgar Degas, began losing his eyesight around the 1880s. His depression and isolation grew exponentially with his blindness, as he could no longer perfectly capture the beauty and grace of his subjects.

18. Charles Dickens: Some psychology professionals and biographers believe the beloved writer experienced bipolar disorder, with the depressive periods cutting into his productivity rather than fueling it.

19. Fyodor Dostoyevsky: Later in his life, famed existentialist novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky developed a serious and destructive gambling habit in order to cope with his burgeoning depression.

20. Nick Drake: Debates abound over whether or not folk musician Nick Drake battled bipolar disorder or clinical depression, since the two do share overlapping symptoms. A lifelong insomniac, he often isolated himself from collaborators and loved ones and self-medicated with drugs and music. Drake eventually passed from an overdose of antidepressants.

21. T.S. Eliot: Poet and author T.S. Eliot's wife Vivian suffered from depression and migraines, requiring plenty of attention and care from her husband. The stress of it all drove him to drink and smoke more often than he probably should have, and the writer himself eventually developed the condition as a result. It did, however, produce a few poems.

22. William Faulkner: Battles against depression and alcoholism did not prevent the quintessential Southern Gothic, modernist writer from winning the Nobel Prize in Literature. While a tragic figure, William Faulkner's successes dispel the myth that depression equals incompetence.

23. Michel Foucault: The heavily influential French philosopher's depression likely stemmed from his homosexuality at a time when such things were even more stigmatized than they are today. However, it likely led to his intensive studies in the fields of psychology and sociology as well.

24. Stephen Fry: Because society listens to celebrities much, much more than they ever will to psychological professionals, Stephen Fry has been an invaluable asset to the destigmatization mental illness in the world. He uses his position as a beloved writer and performer to encourage others with depressive disorders to seek therapy. Diagnosed with bipolar disorder (formerly manic depression), Fry has experienced suicidal behaviors, fugue states and reckless behavior as a result.

25. Paul Gauguin: Suicide attempts and overall mental and physical malaise plagued this popular painter's adult life, so much so he eventually abandoned his family and fled to French Polynesia when the stresses of poverty and artistic failure grew too overwhelming. Even there, though, he drank too much, contracted syphilis and ran afoul of the law and the church.

26. Vincent van Gogh: Perhaps unsurprisingly, Paul Gauguin and Vincent van Gogh formed a tumultuous friendship over their mutual creativity and mental illnesses. Theories abound from epilepsy to schizophrenia to bipolar disorder, but regardless of the source he still grappled with severe depression.

27. Francisco de Goya y Lucientes: Francisco de Goya's artwork reflected his bouts of depression, revolving around themes of absurdity, meaninglessness, physical torment, growing old, death and other common fears and anxieties.

28. Ernest Hemingway: During Ernest Hemingway's famous stint in Cuba, his lifetime of depression and alcoholism began wreaking havoc on his mind, which rendered him paranoid and disoriented until his eventual suicide.

29. Janet Jackson: Pop star Janet Jackson's album "The Velvet Rope" was meant as personal therapy for an extended bout with depression. Anxieties from a high-pressure childhood, a doomed marriage and creative block all filtered into producing the triple-platinum album.

30. Henry James: The Portrait of a Lady scribe began his descent into the very bowels of depression following the disastrous opening to his play Guy Domville. However, he likely worked through these anxieties by writing comparatively more successful serials and novels. Many literary critics and psychologists believe his lifelong bachelorhood stemmed from a crippling fear of sex, which occasionally crops up in his oeuvre.

31. Daniel Johnston: Bipolar disorder and clinical depression are not interchangeable diagnoses, but the former's "low points" share a plethora of symptoms with the latter. Daniel Johnston funnels the delusions and frustrations of bipolar disorder into brilliant artistic and musical works that shed light on his condition.

32. John Keats: Such was John Keats' passion for poetry, depression and self-doubt would overcome him when he felt as if he work could never measure up to that of his contemporaries.

33. Soren Kierkegaard: This iconic, influential existentialist philosopher was no stranger to introspection, painstakingly analyzing his own misery and making connections regarding heredity. His own father also suffered from the condition as well.

34. Ernst Ludwig Kirchner: After two months' worth of voluntary service in the First World War, the German military was forced to discharge expressionist visionary Ernst Ludwig Kirchner for psychiatric evaluation. Journals and surviving artworks, however, reveal a life of mental turmoil and anxiety beyond the battlefield. He eventually committed suicide after the Nazi Party destroyed or confiscated most of his paintings and labeled him a "degenerate artist."

35. Beyonce Knowles: Following the dissolution of her R&B band Destiny's Child, the former frontwoman spent two years in a depressive fog. She still experiences down periods wrought with self-doubt and isolation, debating whether or not therapy will prove worthwhile.

36. Akira Kurosawa: In 1971, one of the greatest filmmakers ever to live slit his wrists and throat in an unsuccessful attempt to escape artistic failure, creative block and health problems. His physical scars healed quickly, but he spent time a few years away from the movies in quiet reflection before an inevitable (and triumphant!) return.

37. Abraham Lincoln: Today's general public would (metaphorically) flay Abraham Lincoln alive if they knew he battled clinical depression. Accounts from family and friends as well as the man himself reflect a melancholic figure who frequently talked of suicide and other morbid matters, but many contemporary historians and psychotherapists attribute that introspection to his political success.

38. Gustav Mahler: Composer and conductor Gustav Mahler always exuded a moodiness, but the real torment settled in after getting married — and neither family approved. His demands for wife Alma to give up her music career understandably placed a massive strain on their relationship, and combined with the death of their young daughter and a chronic heart condition it meant some heavy emotional torment.

39. Michelangelo: One of the Renaissance's most prolific and popular artists is almost as infamous for his melancholic misanthropy as he is the masterful frescoes, sculptures, poems and architectural works he created.

40. John Stuart Mill: As a young man, the significant liberal political philosopher suffered a nervous breakdown resulting from too much study and too little emotional expression.

41. Joan Miro: Acclaimed surrealist Joan Miro phased in and out of depression his entire life; a low period coupled with a bout of typhus encouraged him to drop out of business studies and pursue art instead.

42. Isaac Newton: Sir Isaac Newton, without whom many scientific and mathematical advances would not be possible, often suffered from depressive spells that manifested in verbal altercations with contemporaries.

43. Friedrich Nietzsche: The quintessential existentialist philosopher dealt with his frequent dips into depression and suicidal pressures with narcotics and endangering relationships.

44. J. Robert Oppenheimer: Friends and family wrung their hands over J. Robert Oppenheimer's chain smoking and failure to eat when his mind became too occupied with physics and/or depression. On a few occasions, he even admitted a preference for science over people.

45. Sylvia Plath: Psychology professionals still argue over a specific diagnosis for poet Sylvia Plath, but regardless of labels the woman attempted suicide numerous times before eventually succeeding. Throughout her life, she displayed reckless and irrational behaviors and needed antidepressants to make it through day-to-day doings.

46. Edgar Allen Poe: A lifelong struggle with depression resulted in Poe's most haunting writings — as well as academic difficulties and an ultra-strange marriage to his 13-year-old cousin.

47. Jackson Pollock: Jackson Pollock fell victim to a nervous breakdown in 1938 in spite of therapy, eventually turning his attentions towards alcohol abuse and a mistress to distract himself from debilitating self-doubt and a tumultuous marriage.

48. Mark Rothko: Although family describe him as a rather open and gregarious man, artist Mark Rothko harbored some inner demons that eventually drove him to suicide.

49. Kurt Vonnegut: Depression ran in the beloved writer's family — his mother committed suicide when he was 22. He survived his own attempt in 1984, frequently writing about the experience and opening up readers to the harsh reality of mental illness.

50. David Foster Wallace: Fans were shocked when the enormously talented writer took his own life in September of 2008. In reality, though, he had suffered from clinical depression for almost 20 years. Shortly before that tragic day, Wallace and his therapist had decided to change prescriptions — a move that ultimately proved fatal.

Merck today announced recipients of the 2010 Will to Win Scholarship, which recognizes high school seniors with asthma who are pursuing higher education. Ten scholarships of $5,000 each have been awarded to two high school seniors who demonstrated outstanding performance in each of the five scholarship categories: performing arts, visual arts, community service, athletics and science. "The 2010 Will to Win Scholarship Program extends our commitment to help people with respiratory diseases live fuller lives," said James Fish, M.D., Global Director of Scientific Affairs, Respiratory. "We would like to offer our sincerest congratulations to this year's recipients and wish them continued success in this exciting new phase of their lives." All ten scholarship recipients demonstrated outstanding performance in their entry category, provided a documented track record of achievement, held a minimum cumulative grade point average of 3.5 and earned numerous awards related to their entry category. An independent panel of asthma experts from three national advocacy organizations evaluated many excellent applicant submissions and identified two scholarship recipients per category. "These students have shown discipline, determination and success in managing their asthma, and these qualities were also evident in the classroom and in their extracurricular activities," said Mike Tringale, Vice President of External Affairs for the Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America. "That's why we are proponents of the Will to Win Scholarship - it demonstrates to young asthma sufferers that when the condition is properly managed, there's no reason they can't lead exceptional lives." The 2010 scholarship recipients in each category are: Performing Arts

• Kaitlin Barbo (Clovis High School, Clovis, Calif.) Kaitlin Barbo is pursuing a career as a professional flutist, and she has been the principle flute in multiple musical groups, including her high school wind ensemble and marching band. Although she has battled asthma since she was four years old, Kaitlin challenged herself to play a wind instrument, which can be difficult for an asthma sufferer. She has received numerous honors for her talents, such as being named the principal piccolo for the California Band Directors Association All-State Honor Band and principal flute for the Music for All National Orchestra. Kaitlin is attending the University of North Carolina School of the Arts this fall.
• Victoria Petry (Corbin High School, Corbin, Ky.) Victoria Petry has excelled as a singer and actress, despite being diagnosed with asthma as a young girl. She has performed in numerous musicals and theatrical productions, including the Wizard of Oz, Hello Dolly, A Christmas Carol and As You Like It. In the summer of 2008, Victoria participated in the Governor's School of the Arts for theater. She also enjoys photography, writing poetry, and working for her school newspaper. Victoria plans to pursue an undergraduate degree in performing arts at Stephens College in Columbia, Mo.

Visual Arts

• Chelsea Ford (Summerville High School, Summerville, S.C.) Chelsea Ford, who was diagnosed with asthma at a young age, has a passion for graphic design. From serving as the president of the National Art Honors Society for three years to receiving more than 15 awards for her artistic successes, Chelsea has displayed a dedication to the arts as well as talent as an artist. Chelsea's experiences with asthma have inspired her to pursue a future career as a scientific illustrator after she completes her studies at Savannah College of Art and Design.
• Vincent Parlatore (The Hill School, Boyertown, Pa.) Vincent Parlatore has excelled in many activities despite his childhood struggles with asthma, including becoming an Eagle Scout, which demands intensive wilderness hikes and adventures. According to Vincent, his real passion lies in the arts, and he has showcased this interest by developing a portfolio that examines components of architecture, such as line, color and texture. Vincent intends to pursue a career as an architect in a five-year architectural program at Cornell University.

Community Service

• David Lightfoot (Rampart High School, Colorado Springs, Colo.) David Lightfoot has used his personal struggles with asthma as an inspiration to help other people overcome challenges. He has traveled to Tegicigalpa, Honduras three times, working with the faculty of a school for the deaf to help the students interact with their peers. In 2007, David suggested the school organize a soccer camp to bring together the deaf students and children who can hear. When the school accepted his proposal, David traveled to Honduras to direct the camp himself. The success of this project sparked David's idea to start Heart for the Children, a nonprofit organization dedicated to providing basic needs for underprivileged children around the world. David is now attending the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs.
• Kendall Crouther (Chantilly High School, Chantilly, Va.) Kendall Crouther acknowledges that her asthma has been an obstacle at times, but it's a challenge she is committed to overcome. Kendall recently earned the Girl Scouts' highest honor, the Gold Award, for which she presented a project on reducing the amount of plastic waste in the environment to an audience of 150 students. Through her work with the Girl Scouts, Kendall traveled to Cuernavaca, Mexico, to complete two service projects in 2007. Additionally, she has organized food and clothing drives for the homeless in Washington, D.C. and worked with a national nonprofit organization to distribute these items to those in need. Kendall is attending Elon University in North Carolina to continue her studies.

Athletics

• Ariel Dempsey (Jenison Public High School, Jenison, Mich.) Ariel Dempsey has had asthma since early childhood, often experiencing attacks that led to hospitalizations and missed school days. Despite these obstacles, Ariel was number one in her high school graduating class and broke three school records during her time on her school's track team. In 2007, Ariel won second place in the Division 1 State Championship for 800m and third place in the 3200m relay Indoor Track State Championship. She was also recognized with several leadership awards, including the Board of Education award for "Making a Difference." Ariel is now attending the University of Michigan, where she also runs on the track and cross country teams.
• Callie Nettles (North Cobb High School, Kennesaw, Ga.) Callie Nettles has always strived to be a college athlete, but her asthma often made it difficult for the young swimmer. With her personal determination and the support of her swim team, Callie has become a nationally ranked swimmer and one of the top five back-stroke swimmers in the Southeast. She graduated high school as a five-time Parks and Recreation State Champion and seven-time state team qualifier. Callie also was recognized as a USA Swimming Scholastic All-American three times. She now attends the University of Alabama and swims for the Crimson Tide.

Science

• Angelle Bradford (Woodlawn High School, Baton Rouge, La.) Angelle Bradford decided early on that she would not allow asthma to keep her from striving for her goals. Angelle learned how to successfully manage her asthma in high school, and after conquering her own health issues, she used her passion for science to excel in academics and serve as a tutor to her peers. Angelle was recognized as her high school’s salutatorian, and she participated in the For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology (FIRST) Robotics Competition and Regional Model United Nations Conference. Angelle is attending Louisiana State University where she hopes to work toward her goal of one day becoming a general surgeon.
• Wynton Kun (LaSalle High School, Pasadena, Calif.) Wynton Kun worked diligently with his physician to get his asthma under control, which eventually sparked his interest in science that led to excel in the field. During his junior year of high school, Wynton investigated the frequency and usefulness of chest X-rays taken for pneumonia patients on home mechanical ventilation. He presented the results of his research at the 12th International Conference on Home Mechanical Ventilation in Barcelona, Spain - an honor usually reserved for faculty medical researchers and post-doctoral fellows. Wynton's research was also accepted for presentation at the May 2010 American Thoracic Society International Conference in New Orleans. To further pursue his interest in the medical field, Wynton is attending the University of California, Davis.

You can find out more information about the Will to Win Scholarship Program and this year's recipients by visiting http://www.willtowinscholarship.com/. About Merck Today's Merck is a global healthcare leader working to help the world be well. Merck is known as MSD outside the United States and Canada. Through our prescription medicines, vaccines, biologic therapies, and consumer care and animal health products, we work with customers and operate in more than 140 countries to deliver innovative health solutions. We also demonstrate our commitment to increasing access to healthcare through far-reaching policies, programs and partnerships. For more information, visit www.merck.com.

Address: 4231 St. Aubin St. Detroit, MI 48207
Phone: (313) 831-9727
Facebook: St Albertus Page
Email: albertus1884@gmail.com
Current Parish Status: Closed
School in Operation: No
First Year Parish Founded: 1871
Year Church was Built: 1884-1885
First Pastor: Rev. Fr. Simon Wieczorek
Pastor in 1985: Rev. Fr. Joseph J. Matlenga
Mass Schedule in 1985: Saturday 5:00pm (English); Sunday 9:00am (Polish); 11:30am (English)
Mass Schedule Currently (2010): Monthly on Sundays, generally at 11am
No. of Families in Parish in 1985: 380
Percentage of Polish Descent in 1985: 75%
Considered as a Polish Ethnic Parish: Yes
Polish Religious Traditions Preserved: Yes
Annual Festival: Usually the first Sunday of August (in 1985)
Festival Name: St. Albertus Festival (in 1985)
View Exterior Photos of St Albertus Catholic Church
View Interior Photos of St Albertus Catholic Church
Location: East side

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St. Albertus Church is a historic landmark registered with the State of Michigan. It is the "Mother Church", the first Polish parish in metropolitan Detroit.

Both the Motherhouse of the Felician Sisters and Orchard Lake Seminary (S.S. Cyril and Methodius Seminary) have their roots in the neighborhood of St. Albertus Parish

St. Albertus Parochial School, the oldest in Detroit, closed it's doors in 1966.

The parish was officially closed by the Archdiocese of Detroit in 1990.

St. Albertus Church is listed on the National Register of Historic Places in Detroit with the National Park Service and was also issued a State of Michigan Historic Marker.

The Polish American Historic Site Association (PAHSA) is a non-profit organization that currently operates the Church as a historical site. Masses are said monthly and the church is available for weddings. For current information visit the St. Albertus on Facebook.

Names of parishioners of this parish from the Centennial Jubilee Book (1973) are searchable on the PGSA web site.

The following microfilms of St. Albertus church records are available at the Burton Historical Collection of the Detroit Public Library: Film No.1024
Reel 1: Baptisms July 1872-December 1887
Reel 2: Baptisms December 1887- May 1896
Reel 3: Baptisms May 1896-December 1905
Reel 4: 4 Baptisms January 1906-March 1914
Reel 5: Baptisms March 1914-January 1919
Reel 6: Baptisms January 1919-October 1938
Reel 7: Marriages July 1872-May 1913
Reel 8: Marriages May 1913-November 1936
Reel 9: Deaths January 1889-January 1931

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A Brief History of St Albertus Parish
The nucleus of Detroit's first Polish settlement was formed by a number of Poles who arrived in the city during the middle of the 1850s. As former residents of the Pomerania and Poznan sections of the partitioned Poland, then under Prussian rule, the newly arrived Poles settled in and around the city's German-speaking community. Even though few of these Poles attended St. Mary's German Roman Catholic Church on the corner of St. Antoine and Croghan (Monroe) Streets, the majority utilized the facilities of St. Joseph's German Roman Catholic Church first located on Gratiot between Riopelle and Orleans Streets and later on the southeast corner of Orleans and Jay Street. But the Poles were not satisfied with this arrangement. Desiring to praise God in their native tongue, they began to take steps to organize their own parish in 1870.

Guided by Fr. Simon Wieczorek CR, who had come down occasionally from Parisville, Huron County, Michigan, to attend to the spiritual needs of his countrymen in Detroit, the Poles organized the St. Stanislaus Kostka Society and began to collect funds for the building of a church. Even though he had some misgivings about the Poles' ability to successfully finance the project, Bishop Caspar Henry Borgess granted his approval.

The plot purchased by the parish committee composed of John Lemke, John Kolodziejczky, Anthony Treppa, and Anthony Ostrowski comprised lot thirty-six of the old French St. Aubin Farm. Measuring 100 feet wide and 270 feet deep, situated on the western side of St. Aubin Avenue below the southern corner of Fremont (East Canfield) Street, the land cost $600 which was paid in full to the owner Phillip Beaubien. The transaction was completed November 9, 1871.

On this first parcel of St. Albertus Parish's real estate property arose the congregation's first "church and priesthouse." The building contract, dated October 11, 1871, was signed by architect John Wiesenhoffèr and thirty charter members of the parish.

Construction of the frame church was begun on June 13, 1872. Bishop Borgess blessed and dedicated the church to St. Wojciech on July 14. Due to difficulties in finding a correct English equivalent for their Polish-Bohemian patron, St. Wojciech, the early pastors and parishioners borrowed the erroneous Latin equivalent Adalbertus, translating into English as St. Albertus or St. Albert.

The opening of St. Albertus led to the movement of the Poles into the neighborhood of St. Aubin and Fremont in order to be close to their own church. This migration resulted in the establishment of Detroit's first Polish neighborhood, known among Detroiters as "Poletown" to the Poles, however, it was "Wojciechowo," the "District of St. Albertus."

From the beginning of the parish, Fr. Wieczorek, the first pastor of St. Albertus, had envisioned a parochial school as part of the church complex; however, lack of funds had prevented the construction of a school along with the church and rectory. The education of Polish youth was a primary reason for the establishment of the parish, and Fr. Wieczorek began teaching Polish youth of the parish in a private home as early as 1871.

The first St. Albertus School building was completed in 1873 and opened early in 1874 under the direction of the parish's second pastor Fr. Theodore Gieryk with 97 students. The two story frame building was located on the corner of St. Aubin and Canfield where the present Church stands. The original Church was on the lot directly to the south of the school and the first rectory stood behind the church. During his pastorate, Fr. Theodore Gieryk formally opened the school, laid the foundation of the later Polish Roman Catholic Union, and brought the first Polish Catholic newspaper to Detroit Gazeta Polska Katolicka.

On April 4, 1875, Fr. Alphonse Dombrowski, a Franciscan, was named pastor of St. Albertus. In November, 1877, he acquired an assistant, Fr. Wieczorek's former confrere at Parisville, Fr. John S. Wollowski, a one-armed veteran of the Polish Wars. Fr. Wollowski was appointed pastor of St. Albertus on September 20, 1879. It was at his invitation that five Felician Sisters from Polonia, Wisconsin arrived in Detroit on December 17, 1879, as replacements of the school's lay teachers.

On March 30, 1882, Fr. Wollowski's pastorate was terminated by Bishop Borgess. Fr. Wollowski's successor was Fr. Dominic Kolasinski, newly arrived in Detroit from the Diocese of Krakow. Sociable, relatively young, and energetic, the new pastor soon won the devotion and loyalty of his parishioners. Appealing to their national pride, he urged the erection of a church more in keeping with the Polish tradition. After 13 years of service to a constantly growing Polish community in Detroit, the original Church was replaced by a new and larger structure designed by architect Henry Engelbert and built on the site of the first school by the Spitzely Brothers of Detroit between the years of 1883-1885. The cost was $61,000. It was the largest Catholic Church in the State of Michigan at the time of its construction with a seating capacity of 2500, and was the first in the city of Detroit to be equipped with steam heat and electrical lighting.

The brick western-Polish Gothic edifice was dedicated by Bishop Borgess on July 4, 1885. An imposing structure, 200 feet long and 70 feet wide with a spire of 280 feet high, it was at that time, the second largest Polish Roman Catholic Church in the United States. In 1889, one of the parish's own sons, John A. Lemke, said his first Mass after he was ordained at St. Albertus. It was a proud day for the parishioners!

The Church is similar in appearance to churches found in Prussian Poland. The present Church was built to serve a Polish Community in Detroit estimated at 22,000. The original spire of the Church housed four large bells. It was shortened after a windstorm on Good Friday of 1913 caused extensive damage. The original wooden church building was raffled off in 1888 and removed from the property allowing room for the present rectory to be built in 1891, the previous rectory being donated to the newly formed St. Josaphat Parish.

A second and bigger school building, two story and of brick was built on the lot directly across Canfield Avenue from the Church in 1892 where the present parking lot is located and served the parish until 1917 when the third and final three story school was built on Canfield Avenue immediately behind the church.

The interior of St. Albertus is consistently treated in the medieval style. In this it reflects late nineteenth century practice rather than the historic Polish churches, for the latter are usually encrusted with Baroque work.

Along with the marble altars and communion rail, fittings added before 1913 include a marble pulpit and baptismal font and patterned terra-cotta wainscot. There are sixty-three pieces of painted plaster sculpture within the church, including the fourteen stations of the cross, St. Albertus above the main altar, a large Pieta, and the like.

The windows consist generally of medieval styled stained glass. The north wall of the third bay has the most recent addition, commemorating one thousand years of Christianity in Poland.

St. Albertus, then, is a splendid example of a church whose architectural function was to provide a familiar setting to those Polish immigrants who emigrated to Detroit during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. The building's historic and architectural significance has been recognized. The church was declared a State of Michigan Historic Site and placed on the National Register of Historic Places by the United States Department of the Interior. In 1975 its State Historic Marker was dedicated.

Although the Parish was closed in 1990 it still stands in the old Polish quarter of the city of Detroit as a silent sentinel with its daughter churches of St. Josaphat, St. Stanislaus and Sweetest Heart of Mary as reminders of the Polish roots of the city. May it continue to thrust its golden cross heavenward awaiting its rightful place in our observance of the great history of the Polish community of Detroit.

If you'd like to learn more about the history of this church, I can recommend some excellent books and articles that may be available at your local library:

Detroit's Oldest Polish Parish, St. Albertus 1872-1973 Centennial by Rev. Joseph Swastek (no ISBN # available)

Polish Detroit and the Kolasinski Affair by Lawrence D. Orton, Wayne State University Press, Detroit, 1981. ISBN 0-8143-1671-9

Brief History of St. Albertus Parish, excerpted from Detroit's Oldest Polish Parish: St. Albertus 1872-1973 Centennial. This article appeared in the May 1995 issue of the Polish Genealogical Society of Michigan's journal The Eaglet.


Kolasinski Report (ca 1884) On The Early Polish Community in Detroit, written by Fr. Dominic Kolasinski and translated by Eduard Adam Skendzal. This article also appeared in the May 1995 issue of the Polish Genealogical Society of Michigan's journal The Eaglet.

Rev. John A. Lemke: America's First Native-Born American Roman Catholic Priest by Allan R.Treppa.

The Polish Roman Catholic Churches of Metropolitan Detroit, by PERC. c. 1985. Used with permission from Michael Krolewski, editor.

[Image: Parachute or shelter? Mode of escape or method of dwelling? From Volume 24].

Long-time readers might remember BLDGBLOG's earlier conversation with architect Jeffrey Inaba, posted back in 2007 as part of a suite of interviews with the editors of Volume magazine, including Mark Wigley and Ole Bouman.

This summer, while leaving New York City to return to Los Angeles, and on the occasion of Inaba publishing his recent book World of Giving, with Katharine Meagher, and editing the 24th issue of Volume—to be released next week at an event in New York—I decided to catch up with him about those two publications, about the state of architectural criticism in an age when everyone is being, as Inaba says, "nice," and about the philanthropic potentials of design today.

[Image: From Volume 24].

In World of Giving, Inaba writes that "Giving permeates human activity. It is present always and everywhere." What exactly is giving, though, if it is both economically ubiquitous and socially universal?

"Giving," Inaba suggests, "is any act that improves the capacity of another person. A gift can be as little as a nod of encouragement, or as great as taking a bullet for a friend." And, while the motive to give might involve self-interest—that is, "help is extended to others in order to receive a benefit for oneself"—this is no reason to dismiss a human impulse toward true generosity: "We suggest that to undermine acts of giving with accusations of self-interest is overly simplistic. The potential positive feedback that flows to the giver is just as integral a part of the dynamic of giving as the positive benefit that flows to the receiver."

[Image: From World of Giving].

The complicated laminations of gifts on top of gifts—the worlds of nonprofits, NGOs, philanthropic organizations, and even everyday friends—creates its own social universe, with its own structures, its own unspoken rules, and, as Inaba and Meagher explore, its own architectural implications. Indeed, the latter half of the book specifically explores the spatial effects of the so-called gift economy, looking at the "architecture aid" of groups like Architecture For Humanity, the Gates Foundation, Christopher Alexander, John Turner and the World Bank, Hassan Fathy and the Aga Khan Development Network, and many more.

These examples of "improving the capacity of others," as Inaba phrases it, through better homes, streets, workplaces, and sites of social gathering, is part of the larger overall dynamic of aid capital. What's particularly interesting here—and this is the dilemma of all philanthropic acts—is that gifts bring with them certain functional assumptions: for instance, at the most basic level, that the thing being given is actually of benefit to the recipient. One U.N. official might think, for instance, that all you need to do to rescue a certain city from poverty is establish a strong banking system or a robust highway network, while another presumed expert might think that all you need are active churches, tight-knit families, and access to modern medicine. Yet another might think the whole thing comes down to building stock, or public infrastructure, or women's education, or affordable laptop computers.

But what all of these "gifts" have in common is that they are actually the projection of a political ideology—a vision of how that target society is meant to function. They thus come with contextual requirements that often exceed the bounds of any specific act of philanthropy and depend upon the acts of other organizations to operate at all. So while a gift is often inspired by the generous recognition of a state of need in the future recipient, that same gift is also a projection of how a certain giver thinks the recipient should be living. A "gift" risks becoming the implementation of the giver's own politics.

[Image: From World of Giving].

A few years ago, for instance, I had a brief but interesting conversation with Zach Frechette of GOOD magazine about how differently the idea of "doing good" can be interpreted by different people—that is, what giving can mean for them. Many people, for instance, might think that traveling from village to village to promote abstinence-only sexual education is "good," and that passing out condoms is literally the very definition of moral irresponsibility. Others, of course, might beg to differ. In another context, an urban planner might think that tearing down slums and replacing them with wine bars and luxury condos—even with tower blocks—is a clear-cut urban "good." But at what point does a gift become the strategic imposition of your own politics? When does your idea of good become something more akin to a burden, a setback, a limit given to others?

In any case, Inaba's and Meagher's book presents itself as a glossy—and not inexpensive—research dossier, which I think has limited its reception to the world of architectural academia. But if it had been released as a standard trade paperback by a mass-market publisher like Random House, then I think World of Giving would actually sell remarkably well.

My own interest in the book's ideas finding a larger audience is part of what initially motivated me to record the following conversation.

[Image: The cover from World of Giving].

BLDGBLOG: In the most basic sense, where did the World of Giving project come from? What inspired it? What were you hoping to achieve by focusing on the nature of philanthropy and its architectural manifestations?

Inaba: This came out of research that we first did for the Donor Hall installation at the New Museum in New York. We wanted to think about the larger dynamics of aid, as well as the global system of philanthropy, and to research the role that architecture can play in it.

But, in looking at the topic and thinking it through, we ended up in a very different place than we expected—and we discovered that the topic of giving is much more fundamental than the people who were already covering it seemed to indicate.

Before you can even begin to talk about aid—in the form of philanthropy or in the form of support provided by the government—we had to look at the most basic dynamics of giving, even why people give from one to another in the first place. Once we started to look at that, we found a slightly different story that spanned from the human dynamics of giving all the way down to the delivery of that aid in whatever form.

On the one hand, for example, there's architecture, urbanism, and other forms of physical aid, and, on the other, there is the delivery of what we call aid capital, aid that is given in forms that are less immediately material, such as education or policy support.

[Images: From Donor Hall by INABA Projects, courtesy of the New Museum].

BLDGBLOG: One of the things I found interesting in the Donor Hall project is its inclusion of groups like Hamas—that is, groups listed as terrorist organizations by the U.S. government—as philanthropists. If Al-Qaeda rebuilds your town after a devastating flood—as in Pakistan—then it, too, in the terms of that specific example, becomes a "philanthropic" organization. Donor Hall hints at this kind of parallel economy of gift-giving—another, darker branch of philanthropy that makes its money from off-radar markets and financial practices. See the work of Loretta Napoleoni, for instance. But this analysis is actually missing from the book. Did you deliberately exclude this shadow-philanthropy, so to speak, or did you perhaps lose interest?

Inaba: What was important to us with the Donor Hall was to present to people the range of organizations that give—which includes militias and informal operations, rather than just governments and official institutions. Even with organizations like Hamas, they realize the importance of providing a social and civil infrastructure for the place where they live. Our point there was simply that many organizations understand the importance of providing support on the local level—but, with the book, rather than it being an inventory of all the different kinds of organizations that exist, we wanted to focus on the intentions and the mechanisms.

In that sense, the book is a more fundamental look at giving itself, and not just an overview of the range of the various organizations that give. Giving is often more of an entering-into-collaboration. From the donor down to the people who administer the gifts or grants—via the people who supply the local capital that permits purchase orders to be filled or subcontracts to be signed, and then further on to the people who actually do construction work—a gift is very often just the kicking-off of a much longer process.

And it’s not only the giving of aid, in whatever material a way that might be. It's also about what we call aid capital—the ability to preserve and increase the capacity of another person. That capacity goes far beyond immediate material benefits, to the knowledge that comes with a gift, to the skills that might be picked up because of it, and to the ability of that recipient to then increase the capacity of others.

[Image: From World of Giving].

BLDGBLOG: In the book, you write that "Aid Capital is our term for the power of giving. It is the sum of other resources like economic capital (money), political capital (governmental and institutional sway) and human capital (people's time and energy) composed together with the specific desire to increase the capacity of others."

Inaba: Yeah, aid capital is something that’s very different from, say, political capital or social capital or monetary capital, in the sense that it’s relatively infinite. With political capital, if one garners favors from certain peers and then cashes in those favors at a certain point, while there is an immediate gain as a result of it, that capital has been spent. Whereas when aid capital is exercised, it goes toward helping a recipient in some way: the aid capital is never exhausted or fully spent.

For instance, a person’s volunteer hours will lead to something that might be built as a result—but that person might also then learn how to build better buildings from the experience, and pass that knowledge on to someone else, or to the entire community, or they might learn the management skills necessary for future projects, thus bringing in more people, and more opportunities for training, and so on. The ability for aid capital to build upon itself is something that, in a sense, means there’s no terminus point for giving.

BLDGBLOG: You specifically cite the case of Habitat for Humanity, an organization that chooses its recipients based not on those people's real needs but on whether or not they are responsible enough to take care of what Habitat For Humanity gives to them. In other words, they are chosen based on their ability to become stewards of the gift.

Inaba: We focused on groups like Habitat For Humanity not because we specifically endorse what they do over other organizations, but because they are very illuminating organizations to describe. We thought it was interesting, for instance, that the recipients of assistance from Habitat For Humanity, as you say, wouldn't necessarily be considered people in the most urgent or dire need, but rather people who have the capacity to support continued payments on a house. In that regard, the recipient of a "gift" from Habitat For Humanity would be someone who could usefully occupy the house, live there, and benefit from it—but also, because they are financially sustainable, offer reassure to the volunteers who actually constructed it that their effort has not been in vain.

The decision of who receives a gift has as much to do with building up a support infrastructure of people who will work on and build these houses, as with considering the social consequences of aid and its ability to build upon itself in the community even after the act of giving itself is over.

BLDGBLOG: This restricted nature of a gift—the conditions a giver might impose on future recipients—seems to deserve more attention, in that regard. This past winter, for instance, after the Haiti earthquake, groups like the Red Cross and Doctors Without Borders began specifically asking that donors not limit their gifts only to Haiti—that so much had been given already (and we saw this same situation with the Asian tsunami in 2004) that limiting your gift only to Haiti would actually be too generous, in a sense. Those gifts would actually be needed elsewhere. So there is also the category of the unrestricted gift: the act of true generosity, we might say, one without a specified destination.

Inaba: There's actually a phenomenon called aid congestion, where the delivery of aid is not something that happens instantaneously, and it's something that can discourage people from giving at all.

What we try to explain in the book is that the delivery of aid is very complicated. It deals with urban challenges we're not always familiar with—like how to get resources into a city when all the infrastructure of that city has been incapacitated—and the gift itself has to be constantly transformed and processed before it arrives at its target.

Given the complexity of it all, giving is almost bound to be a very frustrating thing for people. They hear, on the one hand, that there are organizations being set up that might be fraudulent, and, on the other, that their gifts might actually be mismanaged—that there might be a large amount of money that then gets siphoned off to other causes elsewhere. Or there are even cases where very effective organizations are simply crowded out by other organizations, all of which are hoping to supply aid.

BLDGBLOG: Giving becomes a kind of competition.

Inaba: One of the more interesting reasons why giving becomes so complicated, though, is that, at every stage in the delivery process, the material nature of the assistance is forced to change. It goes from someone who wants to give dollars to someone who might process or exchange that money for, say, the payment or international transportation of goods—which then becomes the delivery or receiving of goods at a regional center, and then at a local center, which then becomes paying for people to unload the goods, or store them, or assemble them.

Essentially, it's the transformation of an abstract, often monetary gift into something that is more immediately deliverable. For instance, transferring water from a large container into a truck, and then again into a smaller container: there is a constant transfer or transformation of the gift itself.

At each level, there is an exchange—and every exchange has to be negotiated.

BLDGBLOG: I'm reminded again of the earthquake in Haiti: within about 24 hours of the disaster, UPS began offering free shipment to Haiti for any package less than $50. In essence, UPS was donating its infrastructure and expertise —it was donating the logistical expertise of delivery itself In fact, in World of Giving, you actually describe an official relationship between the United Nations and DHL, where a kind of public-private collaboration between those organizations allows the U.N. literally to deliver aid in a way that would have been impossible without the flexible infrastructure and on-site administrative knowledge of DHL. DHL and UPS here could be seen as infrastructures-for-hire—or to be donated, as the case may be. It's private-sector expertise being put to use in the service of public gain.

Inaba: What interested us specifically with DHL was also the knowledge that their individual workers have, in terms of setting up a local delivery center. The logistics of how to operate a warehouse is a very specific kind of knowledge: where things should come in; where they should be stored; how, and in what order, they should go out.

This kind of expertise can also be highly local to the area that has been affected. For instance, after something goes out of the warehouse, the way in which it is delivered in a region—and even the way packages are addressed there—is something that DHL would understand better than, say, an official at the U.N.

So this is not a question of the delivery of economic capital, but of intelligence.

[Image: DHL in action; from World of Giving].

BLDGBLOG: That touches on the spatial nature of giving in a literal sense—here, the spatial layout of a warehouse and the different local geographies in which those warehouses function. But what about the larger architectural interest of the book? Architecture kicks in about halfway through, I might say. How did your interest in architecture-as-gift arise?

Inaba: On one hand, we really wanted to do something that was along the lines of a spatial/formal analysis of giving—on the level of city planning, on the level of housing in the developing world, and on the level of building. But we also wanted to understand this larger, logistical sense of space.

BLDGBLOG: One example that stuck out to me was the idea of the "roof loan society." Charles Abrams, as you write in the book, saw "backyard stockpiles of weathered building materials" as "frozen assets" that could be put to use for the benefit of the larger community. Wood, cinder blocks, electrical wiring—this unused surplus was a kind of Home Depot in waiting: it was sitting around and not doing anything, though it could and should serve as the basis for local employment and future housing initiatives.

Inaba: We never really hear about Abrams—or about many of the figures in the book—within the world of architecture. They've been absorbed into a different context: of nonprofits, international cooperation, and so on.

BLDGBLOG: They've been absorbed by a larger political narrative?

Inaba: Well, it's the scale of development, or the developmental context, that makes it political.

In this sense, the book is a reflection on our earlier work with the Guide to Shopping. The shopping book was an attempt to address a specific political moment, a moment when high affluence—when acquisition and material gain—became central to the collective psyche and shopping essentially became the sole element through which urban development occurred.

The Giving book marks a different era, one also of high affluence, but we wanted to say that giving, too, has an impact on urban development.

The Guide to Shopping was relatively apolitical—it looked at shopping from a relatively neutral standpoint—but that was very much an assessment of the situation. It was a critique that shopping had become the terminal activity of urbanism. The value of the book was that it could explain specific instances of the relationship between the activity of shopping to the way the city developed, including the invention of new building typologies.

But that's just some background to what you've asked. Basically, we didn't want to judge the particular ideologies or political ideas that architects have in terms of making proposals or delivering aid. In the section that describes the different architects—including Abrams—what we wanted to do was make clear the ideological intents of those architects and to be as specific as possible about the differences that exist between them—between each other, but also between what those architects once said or thought and what those architects now believe and practice.

The book is not politically judgmental on the level of the architects' visions; more importantly, though, it is political in its description of the larger system of giving.

[Image: From World of Giving].

BLDGBLOG: One other thing I think is interesting here actually ties back to an interview you did last year with Chris Anderson of Wired magazine. You discuss what Anderson calls the "reputation economy," and how so much now depends upon constructing and maintaining a good reputation. Where this intersects with World of Giving, though, is where the value of your gift rises along with your reputation—and where people who are willing to receive your gift can also rise or fall depending, again, on the reputation that your organization has.

Think, for instance, of someone who accepts a grant from the Department of Defense, as opposed to someone who accepts a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts: those are two very different organizations, and their generosity comes with, in a sense, quite opposite political implications. There are people who will judge you very harshly for accepting a "gift" from one but not the other. So my point is that the philanthropic economy—the gift economy—seems to offer a nice corollary to the reputation economy that you discussed last year with Anderson.

Inaba: Yeah, that's exactly it. One's reputation increases with your ability to increase the capacities of others—but there's always the question of how exactly you operate or what exactly you offer.

[Images: From the index of World of Giving].

BLDGBLOG: Finally, the index for World of Giving is actually one of the most interesting parts of the book. It's a collection of small photographs that document things like plastic tarps, tent structures, water filtration equipment, and so on—the actual objects through which aid programs operate and the ingredients that become recombined into things like refugee camps and emergency housing. It's a material catalog of giving.

Inaba: With the index, we wanted to show the materials, tools, and objects of giving. However, we wanted people to see how these things now exist alongside new and improved aid materials—from blankets to buildings—but also things like dynamite, mine sweepers, packaging, boots, different forms of tents, power generators, etc.

What we wanted to say was that there is already a design language for giving—and that the design of these things has to do with shipability, weatherproofing, compartmentalization, the economic use of materials, and things that are designed for different durations of use.

We wanted people to be aware that there's a high degree of design that already exists within the different institutions of giving. That's something we can add to—but also something we can learn from, when we work within architecture as a larger practice.

[Image: The table of contents from Volume 24].

BLDGBLOG: Let’s talk about Volume 24, the most recent issue of the magazine, which you edited. In your opening essay, you describe the overarching themes of the issue as follows: "At first glance, what appears prescient about the 60s when looking at current American culture is the preoccupation then and now with computer technology, the natural environment and alternative forms of community; but today each is disconnected from the radical political action and oppositional ideologies of the earlier era." Further, "With the help of countercultural figures, historians and architects, this issue of Volume examines the popularized characteristics of the 60s that have influenced our beliefs about technology, the environment and community." First off, where does this issue overlap, if at all, with World of Giving?

Inaba: One of the connections between this issue of Volume and the World of Giving book is where we see countercultural values emerging today.

For example, there’s what we've come to call the Nice Economy. Part of this is the recognition that one form of giving has now become pervasive, and that’s the sharing of things in various formats—whether it’s sharing songs, text, movies, personal thoughts, or what have you. Giving in exchange for something else—bartering and trading—is very much an activity that comes out of ideas of community and sharing—but this has now become so dominant that it's no longer a counterculture. It's more of an expectation than an ideal, and it bears more scrutiny.

[Image: From Volume 24].

BLDGBLOG: And the Nice Economy is what, exactly?

Inaba: What we're calling the Nice Economy emphasizes consensus, polite concurrence, and the idea of positive reinforcement, as well as making sure that people can work well as a group to the extent that one’s own behavior is not overbearing or doesn't diminish the potential of group dynamics.

There are many popular writers today talking about how this, in general, is a good thing: people are typically kind and good, and they do things like sharing. But it’s almost become a necessity now, in terms of one’s professional life. If you’re anything but nice, it becomes a liability. This is true even to the extent that, a few years ago, being critical—even being an asshole, in terms of commenting on a blog—was common, but it now seems to come with the sense that your comments could get back to you.

So the idea is that being nice has transformed from a thing that was more of an ethos into something that is more like a professional expectation—whether it’s in business, economics, politics, or what have you. I mean, clearly this is better than if we lived in a world where everyone’s an asshole! [laughs] But it’s something that requires assessment, because it has consequences.

On the other hand, it also merits assessment in the sense that one wouldn’t now want to see a counter-reaction to this—to the Nice Economy—where it’s thought that being critical or being negative or being objectionable is, in and of itself, constructive. But nor should being nice simply be accepted as the status quo.

BLDGBLOG; [laughs] My wife's former job—for a nonprofit in San Francisco—actually required her to attend weekly meetings where she and the rest of the staff would receive "the gift of criticism." It was actually called that. I don't think those meetings were very popular. But what it means to "be nice"—and, of course, what it means to "be critical"—really needs to be defined more closely here.

Inaba: Yeah. I think this requires an attitude that is neither one that attempts to be enthusiastic or find positive attributes in everything, nor one where immediately being counter to something, or in opposition against something, in disagreement with something, is in and of itself to be rewarded.

BLDGBLOG: Does the Nice Economy, as you phrase it, risk squeezing criticism out altogether? In other words, we should all just get along and be nice to each other. Or do you see a new, potentially more interesting type of critique emerging from this? For instance, you now also have to add to the discussion; you have the tools now to show that you can build or create something, and it's no longer enough just to complain or tear other people's things down.

Inaba: That’s a good question. In some ways, it’s a question of responsibility: for your criticism to be useful now, a greater, more comprehensive, more coherent, and more productive form of critique seems necessary. I think that’s the very thing that we ourselves are trying to grapple with here. In calling this issue Counter Culture?—with a question mark—it’s as much a question mark to ourselves about how to operate. How can you produce something that is not oppositional or contrarian for the sake of it—and how can you respond constructively, not just with a kind of superficial positivity?

I just want to reiterate quickly that if the Giving book is about the importance of generosity, and of understanding forms of giving, from a very basic human level to the way that giving works between governments, then what we want to make clear is that we present those mechanisms in very constructive terms. It's the negative side of this, on the other hand, that we’re calling the Nice Economy. We want to be precise in looking for ways to transform or take advantage of the Nice Economy, as a way to validate ideas of giving, but not to continue the Nice Economy for its own sake and thus diminish the act of a gift.

[Image: From Volume 24].

BLDGBLOG: Something that also seems to come up in the issue is a larger shift from the Whole Earth Catalog-era of do-it-yourself analogue counterculture to the countercultures of today, which are almost invariably equipment-intensive. Today's countercultures—at least the ones most openly celebrated—are usually electrically dependent and quite high-tech. The question here would seem to be: are these really countercultures at all, then, in any real sense, or are they simply the continuing industrial expansion of the west? Are you a member of a counterculture or are you simply an emerging market for high-tech products (no matter how you might use or abuse them)? I think it’s instructive to juxtapose the off-the-grid fantasies of back-to-the-land 1960s hippies with the heavily mediated, high-tech equivalents of that today—it's been a fairly extraordinary shift, yet it’s only been 40 years.

Inaba: Yeah, yeah. The Whole Earth Catalog was something that was deeply influential to the back-to-the-landers, and it certainly can be understood as a prototype for the internet, in the sense that it produced a knowledge network that was accessible and helped share information between interested parties.

But I think we take it for granted nowadays that social and political situations can only be improved by propelling ourselves forward through advances in technology. An interesting counter-example is something that McKenzie Wark brings up in his essay for the issue. He points out that the Romans—and, to a certain degree, the British—actually narrativized an end-game for their own empires, whereas we’re still caught in a post-Sixties idea of social transformation through technology. In other words, we can't visualize our own end because we assume that we will simply change ourselves—and solve our problems—through technology. That narrative assumption—that technology will necessarily resolve all of our current problems—is something Wark wants to polemically question, and he points out that there's a value to thinking about how to wind things down.

In the realm of architecture, I think what’s been really interesting is exploring the assumed connection between psychedelics—like the taking of LSD and the experience of being under the influence of LSD—and the aesthetics of psychedelia. There’s an assumption that the kind of patterns and colors of psychedelic spaces were very much intended as representations of a psychedelic trip. That’s something we take as a given, even today.

However, I think that Jason King makes an interesting point in his piece for the magazine. For him, a more appropriate corollary would be architecture that’s introverted. That is, something that is introspective rather than a thing that’s expansive. As a psychedelic, LSD might be seen as something that’s more internalizing—and, in that sense, in King's view, it might be that the more acidic architecture would actually be something like Peter Eisenman’s House X or, in fact, any of Eisenman’s House projects.

BLDGBLOG: So, in King’s view, the architecture of LSD would be the solipsistic world of mathematical introversion—represented here by Peter Eisenman—and not the technicolor world of hippie tents and pop-up cities found up in the hills of California? That's fascinating.

Inaba: In some ways, even the synthetic quality of Eisenman's architecture—the technological expertise of it—is similar to the synthesized nature of LSD.

[Image: House X].

BLDGBLOG: There's actually a great moment in Daniel Pinchbeck's book Breaking Open The Head where he describes the architecture of a very bad trip; in this particular scene, Pinchbeck takes some sort of bizarre, highly synthetic hallucinogen and he ends up thinking that he's trapped in a room without doors or walls—but what's funny is that his description of it almost sounds like a building designed by Zaha Hadid. It's seamless, alien, and impossible to escape. [laughs]

Inaba: The specific comparison King tries to make is that, if acid was the drug of choice in the 1960s, and if acid was about introspection, then, by extension, it might be more accurately associated with an architecture that explores its own internalized discourse. For his own part, King associates himself with the 80s/90s and with Ecstasy; that drug experience, he thinks, is more conceptually extroverted, and those feelings and sensations of extroversion became a dominant operative term for his generation of architects.

I think what’s important about this is that it’s based on a questioning of the historical truths that we assume between certain kinds of sensibilities and the aesthetics that come out of them. For example, acid trip = psychedelic imagery. King's idea that this equation can be challenged is nice—but it also seems interesting as a method, because what he sees as being important for his generation of designers is not so much concept-based architecture but what he calls an architecture of affect.

In other words, he’s interested in sensation; he’s interested in the synaesthesia of what something looks like and what its materiality might be—what happens if you privilege feeling over concept. I think it’s that methodology that allows King to reassess a previous era of architecture—to say that Eisenman's architecture is acidic—but also that allows us to be informed about the way that contemporary architects are working.

[Images: From Volume 24].

BLDGBLOG: Alistair Gordon's recent book Spaced Out documents a kind of psychedelic vernacular—hippie enclaves, bubble architectures, parachute-pavilions, paisley walls, irregular room layouts, lots of incense, proud displays of body hair, and so on. Does a focus on this by now fairly clichéd design language play any part in the magazine?

Inaba: Alistair actually wrote a contribution for us. He tries to illustrate the extent to which the psychedelic aesthetic—the way he sees it—has penetrated into mainstream culture. In that sense, his piece is a precise restatement of what he says in Spaced Out: that psychedelic architecture was a kind of evolved vernacular. It was consciously working outside the domain of the professional discourse, and that was exactly its virtue.

We also talked with Chip Lord, from Ant Farm. I think, for us, what’s interesting about Ant Farm is the question of how architects can integrate new media into their work. With them, the fact that they'd always been interested in broadcasting their work really came to an apotheosis with the development of videotape technology. Video meant that they could incorporate broadcasting directly into the realization of their work, so everything from their "Clean Air" project in Berkeley onward deals with media to a certain extent—using media as a way to telegraph information.

In fact, with projects like "Media Burn," Ant Farm not only enabled media to participate in their work directly, they also facilitated a critique of that work through new media like video. In that sense, it’s not just an enthusiastic embrace of a new technology; it also allowed Ant Farm's work to act as a collective lens for interrogating the medium and for interrogating the way in which information is broadcast.

As rebellious and as confrontational as the work might be received today, I think there’s a reflective aspect to it that goes unnoticed.

[Image: From Volume 24].

BLDGBLOG: The inversion of that, of course, is that something that would have been considered quite radical thirty-five or forty years ago would actually be a fairly tame example of multimedia today. For instance, today you can be watching a movie on your iPhone while texting somebody—while walking to work, while surrounded by LED screens on the sidewalk, while playing a game by Area/Code or checking in on foursquare, and so on. If, forty years ago, Archigram had proposed exactly that same scenario as a kind of design provocation—a way of deliberately overloading and inhabiting urban and architectural space—then it would have been considered pretty mind-blowing for its time. But today it’s just our everyday streetscape.

It's as if every child alive today with access to an iPod is already more avant-garde than Archigram.

Inaba: That’s something we’ve been trying to think out with this issue: the broader idea that there isn’t a counterculture at all today, because there isn’t anything monolithic enough to oppose. Things are so diversified now, in terms of an overall intensification of interests and experience, and there are so many different media in which one can work, that a multiplicity of platforms of expression are now allowed—or even expected.

In that sense, there is an anxiety among many people today—including architecture critics and writers—that there needs to be something to oppose. There needs to be something to be counter to.

But I guess our point would be that one of the surprise successes of the Nice Economy is that it makes it difficult to be purely oppositional or purely contrarian. The idea is that, well, if you’re against something, then there are so many opportunities and platforms for you to express your opposition—so you should be constructive in terms of proposing new things.

[Images: From Volume 24].

BLDGBLOG: I might even go further and say that you now have the tools to create or produce whatever it is that you wish someone else had done—be it a film, a novel, a building, a design studio, or whatever—and the real value now is in actually seeing those things through to completion. Just go ahead and do it: do cool things; offer an alternative; create something; demonstrate the shortcomings of others not through criticizing and complaining about them but by doing something more interesting than they can do.

Inaba: For us, it’s more that the mindset of the Nice Economy encourages diversion, in terms of platforms and media. We're more distributed now in what we can do, in the technologies that we have available to us, and in the forms that we can choose to use.

It's harder now to see the immediate value of what it means to be oppositional—of what it means to form a counterculture, and in what it would mean to be mainstream. That's one of the overarching themes of this issue: finding new ways to solve and address problems without being nostalgic for a different era.

* * *

Jeffrey Inaba will be presenting Volume 24 at the New Museum in New York City next week, on Thursday, 30 September 2010. You can read more about the event here.

Though I will not be present for the event, I'd love to hear if any of the above questions and topics are addressed in more depth by the evening's panelists; if you attend the launch and have some thoughts about how it went, either good or bad, please feel free to come back and leave comments here.

Also, I should add that I have two essays in this particular issue of Volume: one coauthored with Liam Young and Tim Maly, and one about poet Allen Ginsberg. With any luck, both of those pieces will soon be available online, and I'll put up a quick link to them.

Here's the latest in our series of posts with our partners at Planet Magazine. They are profiling a series of works by contemporary artists, contemplating the state of our  planet. For more information about 350.org's work with artists, as well as our global sattelite art project, visit 350 Earth.

The latest EARTH BY artists is Cheryl Molnar, whose work is evocative of our planet’s dissolving landscapes, nostalgic dispassion and the complicated lure of open spaces.
 

Growing up in the suburbs of Long Island, New York, Cheryl Molnar adopted a habit of thoughtful wandering — observing the patterns of architectural development and lamenting the lost landscapes as she roamed. Her daily musings over cookie-cutter housing tracts, limitless expansion and the consequent threat to identity in all its forms became the foundation of her work. Much like the over-development of urban (and suburban) spaces, Molnar’s layered landscapes examine the fallacies of the American Dream and the ever-widening gap between homogeneity and individualism. Cheryl Molnar has held solo exhibitions at the McCaig-Welles Gallery and Steuben East Gallery in New York. Selected group exhibitions include White Walls Gallery in San Francisco, Pots Gallery in Seattle and Caren Golden Fine Art in New York. Her work is part of the Microsoft and Cantor Fitzgerald Collections.
 

Earth By is a one-of-a-kind art project that attracts top contemporary artists to create original work based on their personal interpretation of the planet we inhabit. Past contributors include Peter Beard, Chris Johanson, Aurel Schmidt, Allison Schulnik, Ryan McGinness, Hisham Bharoocha and Wangechi Mutu among others. Committed to keeping the project relevant and fresh, each month a new Earth By artist will be introduced, with the original work and a limited edition of prints available for purchase. Envisioned as an opportunity to celebrate and raise awareness about our world, ten percent of all proceeds are donated to Charity: water and 350.org. Visit the gallery to view Earth By’s current roster of artists.
 

The following book review by Henrik Ræder Clausen was originally posted at Europe News, and is republished here with the author’s permission.


Found it: The Islamic Golden Age!
By Henrik R. Clausen

Book essay: The Closing of the Muslim Mind, by Robert R. Reilly.

One of the more interesting memes regarding Islam is that of a so-called “Golden Age”, a historical period when the Islamic world was affluent, progressive and a great place to live. As a historical, physical fact, that meme has been proven false. However, in the secluded area of philosophy, things are somewhat different. As the introduction states:

This book is about one of the greatest intellectual dramas in human history. Its landscape is the Muslim mind.

How man regards his powers of reason has been a decisive influence on the shape and destiny of civilizations, including the Islamic one. How could it be otherwise, when these rational powers affect how reality is perceived, how revelation is perceived, what can be known, and how to discern the meaning of the known?

This is the story of how Islam grappled with the role of reason after its conquests exposed it to Hellenic thought, and how the side of reason ultimately lost in the ensuing, deadly struggle. (The Closing of the Muslim Mind, page 1)

There was a time when Islam embraced Reason and Logic, respected dialogue and challenged Christianity in open debate, a time when Islamic philosophers and leaders did not act from fear of intellectual inferiority. That time was primarily from AD 813 through AD 833, under the rule of Caliph al-Mu’man, and to a lesser extent under the reign of the next two Caliphs, altogether 34 years until AD 847. For the intellectual, this period in Islamic history can indeed be considered ‘Golden’.

Robert R. Reilly, in his book “The Closing of the Muslim Mind”, sets out on an intellectual journey to identify this period, its influence on mainstream Islamic thought (Sunni Islam, to be exact — Shia Islam is different), how this intellectual freedom declined step by step. And in particular how it was ultimately killed off entirely by the Sufi imam Al-Ghazali, crushing the resistance of Ibn Rushd (Averroes), who was eventually declared a heretic. His books were burned in public and he himself was exiled.

In slightly over 200 pages, Reilly dives into the works of Islamic philosophers and the ideological battles that raged up to 1200 years ago, over the nature of Allah, free will vs. predestination, and the eventual defeat of rationalism in the struggle against strict Islamic law, Sharia. A short period of Hellenic influence can be found in the 9th century, followed by an extended period of decline, where over centuries the proponents of free will and rationality were exiled from the heart of Islam.

This book is a stratospheric intellectual journey, for good and for bad. It is not for those intimidated by long philosophical debates, for it does challenge the reader significantly. But for those up to the challenge, the book is highly rewarding, as it enables the reader to identify crucial details in the Islamist narrative, makes it possible to identify subtle sleights of hand, and thus to effectively counter it.

A peculiar feature of the book is that through focusing solely on the relatively narrow field of Islamic philosophy, the historical context of Islamic conquest, Jihad and the political system of Islam are largely not touched upon. This gives Reilly the freedom to address philosophical points on their own merits, but to get the full benefit of the book, it is very useful to have a solid historical background about how Islam developed and spread.

Worse, though, is the fact that Reilly ignores the brutality with which the Mu’tazilite view was enforced. There certainly was a lot of “compulsion in religion” in enforcing the Mu’tazilite view, and it was a far cry from being propagated through polite discourse and sincere conviction. Andrew Bostom describes the means applied by Caliph al-Mu’man in his article Bring Back Islam’s Mu’tazilite “Golden Age”? “

Along the way, Reilly explains in clear terms the problem of voluntarism, in which according to Islamic theology every single happening in life, every stone dropping and every fire lighted, is but the direct expression of Allah’s’ will, and the catastrophic implications this has for the loss (in principle) of cause and effect in Islamic thinking. A reader of Christian background might well find this weird, but it is well worth it to be aware of these fundamental philosophical differences between Islam and other religions.

Eventually, Reilly does not restrict himself to philosophical deliberations. Towards the end of his book, he moves on to show how these philosophical principles, strange as they might sound, empower the fundamentalists and the radicals of Islam — the very people we make so great an effort to defeat.

The book is short, which is probably a good thing. It makes demands on the reader, but pays back well when proper time and deliberation are invested in it. For anyone desiring an insight in how Islamic tenets developed, and how they influence our world today, there is really nothing comparable. Purely historical accounts of Islam abound, philosophical explanations are rare. This is a very valuable contribution, but requires quite a bit of background knowledge to be fully appreciated.

Review opinion: One of a kind, 4/5

Opinion over and done with, let us have a closer look at what this book is about.

What is the “Islamic Golden Age”?

First a detour, though, from philosophical matters to what is more widely known as the Islamic Golden Age, and why it is of such great importance to the Islamist narrative. The myth is nicely summarized as it were fact on Wikipedia (usual Wikipedia caveats apply). More usefully, it defines the time period of the Golden Age:

The Islamic Golden Age is traditionally dated from the mid-8th to the mid-13th century A.D. (sack of Baghdad by Hulagu, the grand-son of Genghis-Khan).

This is simplistic, however, for it defines it simply as the period of the first Abbasid Caliphate, which evades defining what exactly would make the age ‘golden’. The Wikipedia article on the Abbasid Caliphate provides a more honest overview of the rise and decline of the period, showing that it was not exactly golden.

In contrast, here is the meme as propagated by Islamists, from Muslims.eu:

The Islamic Golden Age was of enormous importance to the development of world knowledge and technology. It came in a time when Islam and the People of the Book living under the nation of Islam were politically united and lived in harmony. As usually said, our unity has always lead to our strength and on the other hand fitna is the source of our weakness. The golden age of Islam brought about wonders to the world whether scientific, educational, architectural, medical and or any other subject one can think of.

A common feature of the Golden Age is to list inventions from the Islamic world, as done on their page on Islamic Inventions:

In Islam, it is encouraged to try and achieve the highest knowledge, in an Islamic civilization. The Muslims of the caliphate were reminded about this everyday. When people did try to achieve knowledge, they inspired many others to do so whether Muslim or not, as a result of this when the Caliphate and other Islamic states did exist; advances in technological, medical, social, judicial, scientific, political and many other areas were made everyday.

It’s easy to ridicule such exaggerations, for example by pointing out that European inventions of the same period (not to mention later) are much too numerous to mention, that the inventions in the Islamic world were frequently done by non-Muslims, in spite of Islam, and to no benefit for the citizens of the Islamic countries at large. Or, to look it in another way, that since this intellectual creativity died out at least 750 years ago, the Islamic world must have been ruled by idiot, pirate slave-traders ever since — that it should get its act together and get more sensible rulers.

But that’s not what the Islamists have in mind. Their narrative is different, as explained at Muslims.eu:

Besides being partially conquered multiple times Europe was economically revived thanks to the Muslim Golden Age, Europe would’ve been left behind in Medieval times if it were not for the Muslims.

While this is largely false, there is a seed of truth in there. Two, actually, for Islam did indeed make multiple incursions into Europe, the most famous being halted in AD 732 by Karl Martell. Islam remained the ruling system in Iberia, however, where the Reconquista went on for centuries trying to wrestle control of what is now Spain and Portugal from the Moors. The idea that Europe was economically revived due to the “Muslim Golden Age” is unsubstantiated and false, Europe created its own prosperity, and the Middle Ages were, when examined properly, anything but dark:

Rodney Stark in The Victory of Reason:

Indeed, the so-called Dark Ages was not a time of nothing great being done; much was beginning to be done, mainly through the Catholic Church. Agriculture was progressing because of monasteries which had acquired large amounts of land and needed to use it more efficiently. Some towns developed around monasteries or other Church institutions for work and protection. The Church encouraged this […]

The other seed of truth, so obscure that the author of Muslim.eu would probably not be aware of it, is that when Toledo was conquered from the Moors in 1159, Europe gained access to Greek classics that had been translated into Arabic and kept safe in the library. Safe from influencing Islamic thinking and public philosophy, that is. When these works were translated into Latin, the influence on Christian philosophy was extensive, leading to a revival of philosophy, a clearer understanding of rationality, reason and logic, the first formulations of universal human rights, economical and technical progress, and a voluntary abandonment of slavery.

Thus, the Islamic world did indeed bring seeds of progress to Europe. In contrast to the Islamic world, the seeds found fertile soil, sprouted, grew and bore fruit. But the fact that the classical Greek texts survived in the Islamic world can hardly be credited to Islam itself. This happened in spite of Islam.

The Islamist narrative is not directly concerned with truth, however. The main purpose is that of glorifying Islam, and thereby contribute to making Islam rule supreme. Several elements here try to serve that purpose:

• The belief that Islam revived Europe economically (our technological and accounting advances did that).
  
• The idea that Muslims brought Europe out of the Middle Ages (the Middle Ages were fine in themselves).
  
• The discreet notion that Europe ‘owes’ something to Islam. If anything, the only credit we owe Islam is for motivating our valiant self-defence. There is nothing owed, and nothing that makes Islam deserve any form of repayment.
  
• And, not least, there is the implicit attempt to establish Islam as morally equivalent (at least) to Christianity.

This serves the fundamentalists well, for if there was indeed an Islamic Golden Age, something must have gone wrong later, for Islamic countries are obviously in a rather poor state today:

The myth of an Islamic Golden Age is needed by Islam’s apologists to save it from being damned by its present squalid condition; to prove, as it were, that there is more to Islam than the terrorism of Bin Laden and the decadence of the oil sheiks. It is, frankly, a confession that if the world judges it by what it is today, it comes up rather short, being a religion that has yet to produce a democratic or prosperous society, or social and cultural forms admired by neutral foreign observers the way anyone can admire American freedom, Japanese order, Israeli courage, or Italian style.

The Islamist narrative supports the demand to return to a more strict form of Islam, as aptly formulated in the parody “ It’s in the Quran “, which can be found on the Internet:

In our days of glory, now centuries past
The kingdom of Islam stood mighty and vast
Then we failed our faith and watched your power grow
But soon our greatness will return and this is how we know
Because it’s in the Koran, it’s written in the Koran
A world united under Allah is the future of man
[…]

The call to Jihad is nothing but the call to expend the effort to restore Islamic Faith, the Caliphate, and make the reign of Islam as extensive as possible. This is a battle cry we’d better heed. It is, in part, based on a misreading of history.

One of the ways we can counter the Jihad is to read history properly, give credit where credit is due, and destroy the legitimacy of religious zealots who claim that Europe (or the Jews) somehow ‘stole’ the greatness of Islam. A greatness that, upon examination, turns out to be largely based on exploiting the educated and hard-working non-Muslims in the countries conquered by Islam. This is detailed in several books, for instance Serge Trifkovic: The Sword of the Prophet, who (bluntly, yet based on historical fact) states:

Islam’s “golden age” was parasitic on the Christian cultures and peoples it conquered, and ended when it “killed the host”.

The real Islamic Golden Age

“A people that deprives itself of philosophy necessarily exposes itself to starvation in terms of fresh ideas — in fact, it commits intellectual suicide”, — Fazlur Rahman, Islamic scholar.

While Pope Benedict XVI may be justified in pointing out that we in the West are slowly losing our Hellenic heritage of Reason, it is widely assumed that Islam has always been contrary to reason. This, surprisingly, is not the case. It just happens that Islam was dehellenized so early and so profoundly that even suggesting the idea that things have been different now constitutes heresy.

The roots of this is a debate about who God — in this case Allah — really is. Any such idea must necessarily be compatible with the foundation of Islam, the Quran, and to a lesser extent the hadith. The two main contestants for who Allah is were:

• His absolute will and power
  
• His qualities of justice and rationality

The role of reason is pivotal here. It has immense implications to know, for instance, if reason has any standing to address revelation, judging it against certain standards, or if revelation is above reason.

Since Muhammad was in no way a theologian, it was left for later generations to develop a theology from the Quran and other Islamic traditions. Particularly after the extensive Islamic conquests in the 7th and 8th centuries, the need to develop a consistent notion of the divine became clear, as other religions bordering the Islamic world had long since wrestled with these problems and found well formulated answers to them. Islam needed to catch up, or have its credibility as a religion undermined. The Mu’tazilites were first in doing so, establishing their ideas of divine nature, rationality and morality during the 9th century. Their opponents, the Ash’arites, formed later.

The main contestants were three:

• The Mu’tazilites, who advocated divine reason, justice and morality.
  
• The Ash’arites, who advocate divine omnipotence, not bound by morality or reason.
  
• The Hanbalites, who would have none of this, and stuck to the scriptural commandments.

As the Hanbalites did not even engage in logical debates, the main battle was between the Hellenic-oriented Mu’tazilites, advocating that Allah is reasonable, moral and just, and the fundamentalist Ash’arites, who logically would argue that any commitment to reason or morality would constitute a violation of Allah’s omnipotence and thus be essentially impossible.

This battle of reason and morality versus the supremacy of the Will has taken place at other times and places. Most famously in 19th and 20th century Europe, where the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche and his advocacy of the supremacy of the Will were rudely exploited by rulers considering themselves unbound by any form of absolute morality, leading to an absolute disaster. A similar struggle is currently taking place between Islamic fundamentalists and moderates, the former unfortunately dominating.

From the point of view of a ruling elite, reason and morality are dangerous tools. If they can be held accountable by either, their violations of either can lead to embarrassing situations, which could jeopardize their legitimacy, their claim to be just rulers, and the whole system of absolute rule that has been Islamic tradition through 13 centuries.

As the Mu’tazilite position would grant significant power to the common man, the Ash’arite position would usually be preferable to rulers. This position dominates Sunni Islam today, and constitutes a significant obstacle to establishing accountable democracies in Islamic countries. The decree by Muhammad that whatever the Umma decides is flawless, compounds the problem.

Two decades of reason (within limits)

In 813, Caliph Al-Ma’mun came to power. He was a strong proponent of the Mu’tazilite view and promoted it throughout the Caliphate. In 827, the view that the Quran was part of creation, not eternal, became Islamic orthodoxy. He had Christians at his court and encouraged rational debate about the merits of Islam vs. Christianity, as recorded by long series of letters in the book The Apology of Al-Kindi, from which the following quote is taken (p. 36):

Therefore bring forward all the arguments you wish and say whatever you please and speak your mind freely. Now that you are safe and free to say what ever you please, appoint some arbitrator who will impartially judge between us and lean only towards the truth and be free from the empery of passion, and that arbitrator shall be reason, whereby God makes us responsible for our own rewards and punishments. Hereby I have dealt justly with you and have given you full security and am ready to accept whatever decision reason may give for me or against me.

This is a line of thought from a true rationalist, and it can be difficult to imagine that this kind of debate took place in the palace of the Caliph. Yet, under Al-Ma’mun, it did. The accounts of this, in the book “The Apology of Al-Kindi”, would later be considered such heresy that any house where a copy was found was to be razed, along with 40 houses around it, according to law in Egypt. This is how the Golden Age of Islam was killed. Not that the brutal enforcement of Mu’tazilite views was a shining example, but still…

The downfall

Opposition to the idea of Islam being a rational religion, in which Allah is bound by logic and morality, formed relatively quickly. Al-Ash’ari was the leading opponent, giving rise to the Asharite school of thought, which by means of reason seeks to demonstrate that reason is not compatible with Islam, that reason cannot be used to know the divine, and thus there is no compelling reason to apply reason to the Quran or other things Islamic. This was a more sophisticated position than the Hanbalite, and with a solid footing in Islamic scripture was effective in pushing back Mu’tazilite dominance.

In the year AD 848, the tables were turned. Caliph Ja’afar al-Mutawakkil declared the Mu’tazilite position heretical, punishable by death, and books as well as persons advocating this position were cleansed from the Caliphate, including whipping of the Muslim philosopher Al-Kindi (not the same as above). In 885, the copying of any book on philosophy was banned, and in 892 a ban on trading books on philosophy, theology and related subjects was enforced. The Mu’tazilite position was forced underground.

This led to a cascading collapse of reason within Islam. From the demotion of reason followed the primacy of the will, Allah as unknowable, the loss of causality, epistemology, objective morality, justice and free will. In short, most of the qualities with which Hellenic thinking has endowed Christianity. Much too detailed to repeat here, Reilly goes through how each of these components fell by the wayside, once the fundamental issue of reasons’ applicability to the divine had been resolved. The end result being that practically nothing but jurisprudence, in other words the application of Sharia law, remains a vital and living issue in Islam.

The Metaphysics of the Will, the loss of causality

Probably the most intriguing chapter in the book is the one about the supremacy of the Will. This is a sensitive subject here in Europe, for we know from the disasters of the 20th century how an immoral application of the supremacy of the Will can lead to immense disasters. But the subject is important, not least because large numbers of Islamists today consider themselves subject to the Will of Allah and show extreme determination in applying Allah’s Will in the real world, usually to the detriment of those who do not believe in Allah or the Quran.

Going to the very roots of this raises philosophical questions, such as “Do things exists by themselves?” “Are there laws of nature by which Allah is bound?” “Can there be such a thing as a free will for human beings?” The extreme view of the Asharites is best illustrated through an example. From Islam and Science:

Even a speeding arrow may or may not reach its destination, they said, because at each moment along its path God destroys the world and then creates it afresh the next moment. Where the arrow will be at the next moment, given that it was at a particular spot at an earlier moment, cannot be predicted because it is God alone who knows how the world is to be recreated.

By European Medieval standards, this is really far-fetched. With the advent of modern astrophysics and high precision clocks, this has moved from grossly implausible to obviously absurd. The known universe is roughly 13 billion light years across (to compare, the Solar System is 8 light hours), and if the entire universe was to be destroyed and recreated a billion times a second, Allah would be quite busy tearing things apart and putting them back in the same place they were a billionth of a second earlier. This just doesn’t add up.

A different fundamentally unscientific nature of this claim is that no way exists to disprove it. From a Western point of view, this is too hopelessly absurd to deserve consideration.

Worth noting in context is also the degradation of rationality, in the Western world (and East Asia) considered fine qualities: By descending into absolute voluntarism, rationality becomes benign and meaningless.

From a mainstream Islamic point of view, this world view is a necessity, for no natural law can be permitted to restrict the Will of Allah. Things are different from a Christian point of view, of course, for here the laws of nature are part of Creation, and exist in order that man can examine them and make the most of them. The root causes of the fatalistic Islamic world view is here. Christianity really is fundamentally different, much to the benefit of all who enjoy the products of science and technology.

The loss of rationality has an obvious consequence: the rise of irrationality. From the ‘impure’ nature of pigs, dogs and infidels to the spread of absurd literature, such as Mein Kampf and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the Islamic world has little basis for evaluating what is rational and what people have been forced to believe, nor even tell the difference between the two ways of thinking.

The chaotic worldview is a bad breeding ground for absolute morality, like a solid concept of private property or the sanctity of life as such, and provides no philosophical basis for contradicting terrorists such as PLO, Hamas or Hezbollah, who act in the name of Islam and Allah. This is what the final parts of Reilly’s book deals with, and is important for policies today. We cannot assume that our opponents act in way we would consider rational, including the vital point of respecting treaties and other mutual agreements. We need to use our own critical faculties in this case.

The final kill: Al-Ghazali

Back to history, where one important figure deserves mention, to say the least. For even though the Mu’tazilite world view had been pushed from the throne, it still existed in the Islamic world for centuries. To not only discredit the idea that Islam can be compatible with reason, but to kill it and bury it deep, a very special person was needed. That special person was one of the greatest nihilists the world has ever fostered, the Sufi master and philosopher al-Ghazali (AD 1058-1111).

Looking for certitude in the world around him, he found nothing (incidentally, Buddha would agree on the premise — but certainly not on the conclusion), and al-Ghazali descended into a deep personal crisis:

Of course, speculations such as these reduce everything to gibberish and make it impossible to think. Once you negate the reliability of the senses and jettison the principle of contradiction, all meaningful discourse comes to a halt. Not surprisingly, the effect on al-Ghazali was an acute mental, if not psychological, crisis:

“This unhappy state lasted about two months, during which I was not, it is true, explicitly or by profession, but morally and essentially, a thorough-going sceptic.” Then “Allah at last deigned to heal me of this mental malady; my mind recovered sanity and equilibrium, the primary assumptions of reason recovered with me all their stringency and force. I owed my deliverance, not to the concatenation of proofs and arguments, but to the light which Allah caused to penetrate into my heart — the light which illuminates the threshold of all knowledge.”

It is said that al-Ghazali then had Muhammad instruct him through his dreams to drive reason out of Islam, to which he complied by a direct assault on anything related to reason. Muhammad then showed himself another time, instructing al-Ghazali to not merely abandon reason, but instead use reason as the very tool to evict reason from Islam. His magnum opus, The Incoherence of the Philosophers (ca. 1090), (PDF here), should be seen in this light.

Al-Ghazali’s rejection of reason and assertion of voluntarism swept the Islamic world and became mainstream Sunni orthodoxy. In twenty chapters, it analyses and disparages any form of philosophical approach to knowing the divine, and effectively shuts the door to reason as being valuable or a worthy pursuit for pious Muslims. The door remains shut, to the detriment of abstract debate of reforming Islam.

In fact, the only issue truly left open to debate amongst Islamic scholars is the particulars of implementing Islamic law, Sharia. Thus, al-Ghazali significantly strengthened the fundamentalist reading of Islam and created a foundation that later the Muslim Brotherhood and its ideologists Hassan al-Banna and Sayyid Qutb would build upon, in turn providing intellectual justification for today’s’ Islamic terrorists.

It deserves mention that a countercharge on The Incoherence was launched. In The Incoherence of the Incoherence, Islamic philosopher Ibn Rushd (1126-1198) (also known as Averroes) defended the Aristotelian tradition against the voluntaristic and irrational analysis of al-Ghazali. But this was too little, too late. Averroes lived to see his books burned in Cordoba and himself forced into exile. The Muslim mind had been effectively shut, and the Islamic world stood fast in face of any challenges.

Thus also Islamic apologists who refer to Averroes as an example of profound Islamic philosophy really should know better. His books having been burned and himself exiled, he hardly constitutes any meaningful evidence of the acceptance of profound philosophy and rational thinking. Quite the contrary, he is a dire example of the consequences of such free thinking in the Islamic world.

Can the Islamic mind be reopened?

Or put in another way: “Can we enter the modern world and still retain our faith?” This is a tough question, and fundamentalists — who are clearly the most powerful today — are clear in their rejection of the idea. Probably the only way for this to happen is that Islam enter a profound existential crisis and rediscovers the forgotten seeds of Aristotelian thinking of the Mu’tazilites. This would require the West to solidly reject any kind of fundamentalist Islam that might take root in modern societies, isolating Islam to deal with the existential crisis at home. This does not seem likely at present, but a better understanding of the profound differences between Islamic and Western lines of thinking would contribute to making it happen.

If you are with me so far, having read the preceding eight pages with interest, let me offer an alternative review opinion:

Get this book! Read it!

It traces Islamic thinking in ways hardly offered anywhere else, and does so without the feeling of prejudice that other critical books of Islam carry. Then take the knowledge into the world and make the case for Islam to return to rationality. If it does, that would seriously undermine the justification for Islamic terrorism. If not, the same would happen. For then Islam would be seen increasingly as hopelessly antiquated, not a salvation for Muslims, but rather a yoke to be discarded.

Executive Director
GASLAMP QUARTER HISTORICAL FOUNDATION
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Salary: $40,000 to $60,000
Position Title: Foundation Executive Director
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Applicants/Resumes Only Accepted Through October 1, 2010

General Summary:
Responsible for the general management of Gaslamp Quarter Historical Foundation (GQHF), ensuring that its mission and goals are achieved and its policies are implemented. Primary areas of responsibility include planning, budgeting, fundraising, administration, facilities management, community relations, Board relations, volunteer and staff development.
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including fund development, budgeting and financial management
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The Gaslamp Quarter Historical Foundation is an equal opportunity employer.

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Applicants/Resumes Only Accepted Through October 1, 2010

WASHINGTON – Today, President Barack Obama announced his intent to nominate the following individuals to key administration posts:
 

• Cameron Munter, Ambassador to the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, Department of State

• Pamela Ann White, Ambassador to the Republic of The Gambia, Department of State

• Sam E. Angel, Commissioner, Mississippi River Commission

• Marsha Ternus, Member, Board of Directors of the State Justice Institute

President Obama also announced his intent to appoint the following individuals to key administrations posts:
 

• Karen L. Braitmayer, Member, Architectural and Transportation Barriers Compliance Access Board

• Howard A. Rosenblum,  Member, Architectural and Transportation Barriers Compliance Access Board

• Demetria Henderson, Member, President’s Board of Advisors on Historically Black Colleges and Universities

• Helen T. McAlpine, Member, President’s Board of Advisors on Historically Black Colleges and Universities

• Alma Johnson Powell, Member, President’s Board of Advisors on Historically Black Colleges and Universities

• E. John Rice, Jr., Member, President’s Board of Advisors on Historically Black Colleges and Universities

• Dianne Boardley Suber, Member, President’s Board of Advisors on Historically Black Colleges and Universities

 
President Obama said, “I am proud to nominate such impressive men and women to these important roles, and I am grateful they have agreed to lend their considerable talents to this administration. I look forward to working with them in the months and years ahead.”
 
President Obama announced his intent to nominate the following individuals to key administration posts:
 
Cameron Munter, Nominee for Ambassador to the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, Department of State
Cameron Munter is a career member of the Foreign Service, with the rank of Minister.  He most recently served as Ambassador to Serbia. Dr. Munter has served as Deputy Chief of Mission in Iraq, the Czech Republic and Poland. Dr. Munter was the first leader of the first Provincial Reconstruction Team in Iraq in 2006, in Mosul.  In Washington, he was Director for Central Europe at the National Security Council, Executive Assistant to the Counselor at the State Department, and Chief of Staff of the NATO Enlargement Ratification Office.  His previous overseas assignments include Germany, Poland, and the Czech Republic.  Dr. Munter received his PhD from the Johns Hopkins University and B.A. from Cornell University. He was also a Rusk Fellow at the Institute for the Study of Diplomacy at Georgetown University.
 
Pamela Ann White, Nominee for Ambassador to the Republic of The Gambia, Department of State
Pamela Ann White is a member of the Senior Foreign Service with the rank of Career Minister. She has served since 2008 as the USAID Mission Director in Liberia. She also served as Mission Director in Mali and Tanzania. Ms. White has served in a variety of overseas posts as the Executive Officer including Senegal, Haiti, Egypt and South Africa.  Before becoming an Executive Officer, she was the Community Liaison Officer in Burkina Faso. In Washington she was named USAID Chief of Recruitment and Personnel Planning. She also served in the Bureaus of Global Affairs and Africa. She started her foreign service career as a Peace Corps volunteer in Cameroon in 1971. Ms. White received her B.A. in journalism from the University of Maine, an M.A. from the School for International Training, and an M.S. from the Industrial College of Armed Forces.
 
Sam E. Angel, Nominee for Commissioner, Mississippi River Commission
Sam E. Angel currently serves as president of Epstein Land Company and Epstein Gin Company, director and former president of the Dumas Cotton Warehouse, and commissioner of the Chicot County Watershed District. He also has served continuously on the Mississippi River Commission since first being appointed in 1979.  He is a former commissioner of the Chicot County Rural Development Authority and the Southeast Arkansas Levee District. He is a director of the Bank of Lake Village and present director and former president and chairman of the board of the Southern Cotton Ginners Association. Mr. Angel is a former delegate and director of the board of the National Cotton Council of America and a former member of the board of the Cotton Warehouse Association of America. Mr. Angel was voted 2004 Man of the Year by the Lake Village Chamber of Commerce, and in 2008 he was presented the Arkansas Heritage Award by the governor of Arkansas. Mr. Angel served with the Army National Guard from 1957 until 1965, and the U.S. Army from 1961 to 1962.
 
Marsha Ternus, Nominee for Member, Board of Directors of the State Justice Institute
Marsha Ternus is currently the Chief Justice for the Iowa Supreme Court. She was appointed to the Court in 2003 and selected as Chief Justice in 2006. Prior to becoming a judge, Chief Justice Ternus was in private practice at the law firm of Bradshaw, Fowler, Proctor & Fairgrave from 1977 to 1993. Chief Justice Ternus serves on the Board of Directors of the Conference of Chief Justices and on the Judicial Conference Committee on Federal State Jurisdiction.  She received a J.D. with Honors, Order of the Coif, from Drake University Law School and a B.A. with high distinction, Phi Beta Kappa, from the University of Iowa.
 
 
President Obama announced his intent to appoint the following individuals to key administration posts:
 
Karen L. Braitmayer, Appointee for Member, Architectural and Transportation Barriers Compliance Access Board
Karen L. Braitmayer is a registered Architect and Principal with Studio Pacifica Ltd., an architectural consulting firm focused on Accessible Design and Accessibility Consulting.  A lifelong wheelchair user, she has made accessibility consulting and design services her focus since 1990 and co-founded Studio Pacifica, Ltd. in 1993.  Braitmayer has assisted various state agencies, local governments, school districts, architects, home and building owners with compliance on ADA, FHA and state code compliance for housing, commercial, retail, institutional and educational projects.  As an appointed member of the Washington State Building Code Council from 1994 through 2001, and continuing as a member of Technical Advisory Groups, Braitmayer participates in the development of building codes to ensure that the State Accessibility code reflects the needs of the citizens of Washington. Braitmayer is an International Code Council certified Accessibility Inspector/Plans Examiner.
 
Howard A. Rosenblum, Appointee for Member, Architectural and Transportation Barriers Compliance Access Board
Howard A. Rosenblum is a Senior Attorney at Equip for Equality, a nonprofit organization designated as Illinois’ Protection and Advocacy entity. Having served as an attorney for eighteen years, Mr. Rosenblum’s legal practice focuses on the areas of disability rights and special education. He has been involved in major litigation under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, and other laws impacting the rights of people with disabilities. Mr. Rosenblum is the co-founder and Chairperson of the Midwest Center on Law and the Deaf, dedicated to ensuring equal access to the legal system for deaf and hard-of-hearing people. He has also served as the Public Policy Chair for the National Association of the Deaf (NAD) since 2006. Mr. Rosenblum received his law degree from IIT Chicago-Kent College of Law and his Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Engineering from the University of Arizona.
 
Demetria Henderson, Appointee for Member, President’s Board of Advisors on Historically Black Colleges and Universities
Demetria Henderson is currently a 2010 Corps Member for Teach for America. She is also a recent graduate of Florida Agricultural & Mechanical University (FAMU), which is part of the HBCU system.  While at FAMU, Henderson has served as a HBCU Americorps member, helping to mentor incoming college freshman as well as a coach and mentor for teens in the Police Athletic League.  She received her B.A. in Psychology from FAMU in May 2010.
 
Helen T. McAlpine, Appointee for Member, President’s Board of Advisors on Historically Black Colleges and Universities
Helen McAlpine has been the President of J. F. Drake State Technical College since 2000.  Dr. McAlpine has over 38 years of experience in the field of education.  Her prior positions include Assistant Superintendent of the Huntsville City School System and several positions with the Gadsden City School System.  She has also taught at the secondary and post-secondary levels, including at Jacksonville State University.  She received her B.A. in English from Talladega College, her M.S. from Jacksonville State University, and  her Ed.D. from the University of Alabama.
 
Alma Johnson Powell, Appointee for Member, President’s Board of Advisors on Historically Black Colleges and Universities
Alma Powell is the Chair of America’s Promise Alliance, which seeks to enhance partnerships to ensure that students are prepared for college and work. She also chairs the advisory board for the Pew Center for Civic Change. From 1989 to 2000, she served as the chairman of the National Council of the Best Friends Foundation, an organization dedicated to improving the lives of young girls. She graduated from Fisk University and studied at Emerson College.
 
E. John Rice, Jr., Appointee for Member, President’s Board of Advisors on Historically Black Colleges and Universities
John Rice founded Management Leadership for Tomorrow (MLT) in 1994 and has served as its CEO since 2001. MLT is a non-profit that works to develop the next generation of African American, Hispanic, and Native American leaders in major corporations, non-profit organizations, and entrepreneurial ventures. Prior to MLT, Rice was an executive with the National Basketball Association, where he served as managing director of NBA Japan from 1998-2000 and as director of marketing for Latin America from 1996-1998. Before joining the NBA, Rice spent four years (1992-1996) with the Walt Disney Company in new business development and marketing for both the Disney Vacation Club and Disney Consumer Products Latin America. From 1988 to 1990, Rice worked as an account executive with AT&T.  Rice received his MBA from Harvard Business School and his BA with honors in Latin American Studies from Yale.
 
Dianne Boardley Suber, Appointee for Member, President’s Board of Advisors on Historically Black Colleges and Universities
Dianne Boardley Suber is the 10th President of Saint Augustine's College.  She assumed the presidency of the college in December 1999.  Dr. Suber is an experienced educator and administrator with 35 years of teaching, consulting and administrative experience in preschool and higher education. She has served as a classroom teacher, elementary and middle school principal, university professor and consultant to several national educational organizations.  Dr. Suber received a bachelor of science degree in early childhood education from Hampton University, a master’s of education degree in curriculum development from the University of Illinois--Urbana and a doctorate of education degree in educational administration from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in Blacksburg, Virginia.

From the hip-hop artist who scares Kanye West to the funniest teens on the telly and the launch of Tom Ford's must-have womenswear label, here are 20 highlights for the next season

1. Celebrity offspring

It's easy to be envious of second-generation celebrities. Not only do their genes mean that without even trying they look vaguely famous, but they also get an unfair leg-up when it comes to money and contacts. While most of them squander their good luck, there's a batch of famous names who are annoyingly impressive. Though both Julia and Vladimir Restoin Roitfeld, children of French Vogue editor Carine, have done the obligatory modelling stint, they've both now struck out on their own. Vladimir, 28, has launched Feedback, a company that stages pop-up art shows, big sister Julia, meanwhile, works as a consultant art director. Elsewhere, Holly Branson has dropped out of medical school to work as publisher on entertainment magazine Maverick for dad, Richard. Max Minghella, 24-year-old son of Anthony, is co-starring in David Fincher's film The Social Network, about the founders of Facebook. David Bowie's son Duncan Jones caused a stir with his directorial debut, Moon, and his latest film, Source Code, is out next year. Connected and gifted. There really is nothing to like about these people.

2. Living in modern homes

Holiday lettings company Living Architecture allows people to experience what it is like to live, eat and sleep in a space designed by an outstanding architectural practice. Created by Alain de Botton, author of The Architecture of Happiness, the non-profit foundation has commissioned some of Europe's leading architects to design five houses in Suffolk, Kent, Norfolk and Devon, which will be available to rent year-round, with prices starting from £20 per person per night. The company sees itself as "an educational body, dedicated to enhancing the appreciation of architecture". The first two properties (both sleeping eight and available to rent from October) are the Balancing Barn in Suffolk and the Shingle House in Dungeness.

• living-architecture.co.uk

3. Daniel Sloss

Most teenagers spend their time making sure their mates don't laugh at them, but Daniel Sloss started his comedy career at 16. Four years on, the Fife prodigy, whose material riffs on computer games and teen angst, has just had his own TV pilot on BBC3. Now a festival regular from Latitude to Edinburgh, he's also performing a series of solo shows this September in London, Nottingham and Glasgow, as well as appearing on The Rob Brydon Show and Michael McIntyre's Comedy Roadshow – expect to see a lot more of him.

• Daniel Sloss is at the Soho Theatre, London, from 20-25 September (danielsloss.co.uk)

4. Rory Kinnear

His features may not scream "leading man", but 32-year-old Rory Kinnear has been the worst-kept secret in acting for the past couple of years (the 2009 Olivier award really blew his cover) and his Hamlet at the National Theatre this October is set to be the hottest ticket since… well, since David Tennant was Hamlet. If you don't get to see him on stage, you'll scarcely be able to miss him on the box in the coming months: as well as his current role in Vexed, he's set to star in the BBC's new adaptation of Women in Love and also Mark Gatiss's comedy drama, First Men in the Moon.

• Hamlet is at the National Theatre from 1 October (nationaltheatre.org.uk)

5. Collected letters

The letter may not be the most cutting-edge of literary forms, but this autumn there is a triple reminder of the nosy pleasure of being able to read the epistles of others. Next month, Under the Sun: The Letters of Bruce Chatwin (Jonathan Cape, £25) is published. Then, in October, we have Philip Larkin: Letters to Monica (Faber, £22.50), a collection of the poet's missives to his lover of 40 years. And in November there's Saul Bellow: Letters (Viking, £22), featuring the master's correspondences with a range of fellow writers, from Faulkner to Amis.

6. Truly local food

Call it the Noma effect: the impact on luxury restaurants everywhere of the success of Copenhagen's Noma, this year named the world's best. Its commitment to use only ingredients from within its region has forced ambitious chefs to rethink what "local" really means. Witness this year's biggest opening, Dinner by Heston Blumenthal at London's Mandarin Oriental Hotel. Food at his flagship restaurant, the Fat Duck, is littered with international ingredients, but his new venture will concentrate on British dishes "celebrating the very best of British produce".

• Dinner by Heston Blumenthal at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel, London, opens on 1 December

7. Bee keeping

Keeping chickens just isn't enough of a challenge any more: for back-garden farmers it's all about bees now. We're already coveting Omlet's beautiful Beehaus, and considering one of Zootrain's one-day introduction courses to beekeeping this September. Then there's Gloria Havenhand's book, Honey, to tell us how to plant a bee-friendly garden… But it's mostly so we can put on our best Eddie Izzard voice and yell: "I'm covered in bees!"

• Omlet.co.uk; zootrain.com; Honey by Gloria Havenhand (Kyle Cathie, £12.99)

8. Nicki Minaj

Kanye West is so in awe of fellow rapper Nicki Minaj's potential that he called the 25-year-old New Yorker "the scariest artist right now". A graduate of the performing arts school immortalised in Fame, Minaj has an outrageous sense of theatre that has made her stand out in a hip-hop world short on female artists offering more than straight sex appeal. Having stolen the show with guest spots on tracks by Mariah Carey, Usher and Christina Aguilera, she steps into the spotlight this autumn with her own much-anticipated debut album, Pink Friday.

• Pink Friday is released on 23 November

9. Tom Ford womenswear

Ever since Tom Ford left Gucci in 2004, he's been promising to launch his own womenswear line. And it finally looks like it's going to happen. Over the past year, he's assembled a team of designers who've worked on labels such as Givenchy and Alexander McQueen to help him shape the collection. He also gave a sneak preview by creating a one-off dress for actress Julianne Moore. Word on fashion street is that Tom Ford womenswear will debut in January 2011… So, not much longer to wait.

10. Back to-school style

Knee socks with brogues, pleated woollen skirts and chunky cardis. Blazers and berets, duffle coats and prim Princess coats… Fashion's idea of school does seem to be based upon a model last seen in the 1960s, nonetheless it's charming. The easiest way into it? Buy a satchel.

• Satchel, £98, from Urban Outfitters (urbanoutfitters.co.uk)

11. The Inbetweeners

If you've never seen The Inbetweeners, you can get the gist from the two-and-a-half-minute catch-up film on E4's website. Four gawky schoolboys sit around a drab sixth-form common room talking about what they did in the summer holidays. Gangly dimwit Neil nearly cheated on his "wank girlfriend", Hayden Panettiere, with Fearne Cotton; cocky fantasist Jay claims to have been at a Thai kickboxing camp (but was actually at his nan's); lovestruck Simon is still mooning over the unattainable Carli; and posh nerd Will is worried about his exams, as last time he sat one he shat his pants. And no, not metaphorically.

This is the level of humour at which writers Iain Morris and Damon Beesley's very loosely autobiographical hit series operates. Nob jokes, bollock jokes, poo jokes, gay jokes and hitherto-unknown-to-us "clunge" jokes. It's not particularly sophisticated, but then nor are 17-year-old boys, or the predicaments they get into – projectile vomiting over a love interest's little brother, buying shoes off a tramp to get into a nightclub, being cuckolded by a French exchange student. It may be extreme, but as a show that conveys the mundanity, inanity and routine humiliation of teenage life – as opposed to the melodrama and perfect complexions in Skins – it couldn't be more painfully accurate.

All of which makes it weird that it wasn't supposed to be about 17-year-olds at all. "Originally the show was going to be about Iain and Damon as 30-year-olds," explains Simon Bird, the stand-up comic and TV presenter who plays Will, the programme's narrator. "They lived together for a while at that age and got into situations you can't believe. It was Channel 4 who said to make it about teenagers." For the not-quite-teenage cast ("I think at the start we did look young enough – just," says 26-year-old Bird), they recruited actors James Buckley, 23, and Blake Harrison, 25, to play Jay and Neil, while Bird and his 26-year-old writing partner Joe Thomas, who plays Simon, were cast at the last minute through "really just nepotism".

The show has become such a success – it won the audience award at this year's TV Baftas and Bird picked up best actor at the 2009 British Comedy Awards – that a film version was almost inevitable (the funding is in place, Bird confirms, the organisation less so). In the meantime there's the third series that starts on E4 in September and, with the boys in the last year of school, the stakes are higher than ever. Will Simon pull Carli? Can Jay stop fibbing? Will Neil betray Hayden? Can Will get through his exams without changing his trousers? If you haven't seen The Inbetweeners, it could be time to take the clunge.

12. Gap-toothed smiles

The sort of delightfully wonky smiles that make American dentists shudder have become fashion's most coveted accessory. While Georgia May Jagger graced her first Vogue cover this year, and Vanessa Paradis had her biggest cinema hit for years with Heartbreaker, some of the most-influential fashion houses have also fallen for the charm of the gap-toothed model. Lara Stone Dutch supermodel and wife of David Walliams, is the face of Calvin Klein this season; Australian Abbey Lee Kershaw stars in both Chanel and Mulberry ads; and American model Lindsey Wixson does the honours for Miu Miu.

13. Gaming heaven

All the major videogame consoles launch intriguing add-ons over the next six months. First up is the PlayStation Move, a motion-sensor games controller similar to the Nintendo Wii, out this September. November sees the launch of Kinect for the Xbox 360, which lets gamers do away with a controller altogether, playing solely through gestures and spoken commands. You'll have to wait until March 2011 for the Nintendo 3DS, but this new portable console promises 3D effects without the need for special glasses. Nintendogs will never be the same again.

14. Jaime Hayon's wire chair

Hayon has long been the superstar of industrial design, but this September sees the launch of his first complete furniture range for the UK-based Sé (se-london.com). Witty and unusual – but not too witty or unusual – our favourite is his wiry armchair.

15. Sarah Silverman

By the age of two, Sarah Silverman was making her family laugh by saying the word "fuck". She's been funny for nearly 40 years, but it's only now, with the publication of her autobiography, The Bedwetter, and her starring role in Sarah Polley's film Take This Waltz, that the UK is really ready to take notice.

To recap, Silverman's the lady who dresses like a teenage boy and does jokes such as: "I don't care if you think I'm a racist. I just want you to think I'm thin." She's the comedian whose sitcom, the Sarah Silverman Program, featured her awkward one-night stand with God. She's the woman who, as a bedwetting teenager suffered depression so bad she dropped out of school for a year and took 16 Xanax a day. "It happened as fast as a cloud covering the sun," she writes in The Bedwetter. At 13, as she sat in her therapist's waiting room, his colleague rushed in screaming that he'd hanged himself. "There needs to be some protocol for how we tell depressed teenage girls that their shrinks have killed themselves," she says. At 22, she wrote for US show Saturday Night Live. At 26, she was acting in Seinfeld. In 2008, her musical video message for then-boyfriend, talkshow host Jimmy Kimmel, went viral. And with "I'm Fucking Matt Damon", suddenly, she was famous.

Her humour unwraps taboos using indie guitar and comments about her beloved Jewish family. She's become one of the most successful comedians in America. And this autumn, she'll finally make her mark over here.

The Bedwetter: Stories of Courage, Redemption and Pee is out next week. Take This Waltz (which Silverman opens with the line, "I look in the mirror, and I wanna fuck myself") opens early next year

16. Electric family cars

This Wednesday, online ordering starts for the Nissan Leaf, one of the most radical developments in motoring in recent years. The car will cost £23,990 and production is set to begin in November in Sunderland. From the outside it may not look particularly futuristic, but what lies beneath is truly ground-breaking – it is the world's first mass-production all-electric family car. An eight-hour charge will give you about 100 miles of motoring and a top speed of 90mph, but there's no tax, no fuel, no emissions, no sound and virtually no cost.

17. Camouflage nails

As nail-watchers know, where Chanel leads other varnishes follow. This autumn, it's producing a limited-edition collection of camouflage shades. Star manicurist Sophy Robson will be creating camo designs at the Chanel store for Vogue's Fashion's Night Out, and sees the trend exploding in time for winter. "I guess it's all part of the 90s revival," she says.

• Fashion's Night Out is on 8 September (sophyrobson.com)

18. Futuristic hotels in Rajasthan

"We are seeing Indian hotels experimenting with some really exciting modern architecture," says Mandy Nickerson of Bales Worldwide. There's the Devi Ratn hotel in Jaipur (deviresorts.in/deviratn); the Mihirgarh in the desert just outside Jodhpur (mihirgarh.com); and the Raas, situated within the city walls of Jodhpur (raasjodhpur.com), which is plush new build designed to resemble forts. "They're a far cry from the old-school colonial hotels of yesteryear," she says.

19. A Sauvage

The buzz around 27-year-old tailor Adrien Sauvage started back in February when GQ magazine started tweeting about him. This autumn sees the launch of his label, A Sauvage, with debut collection "This is Not a Suit" – it's full of unfussy, beautifully cut suits and blazers. His designs bear out the idea behind the collection: this is not a suit, it's a way of life.

• A Sauvage from matchesfashion.com

20. Bill Granger

He's the poster boy for brunch and the man the New York Times christened the "egg master of Sydney". But for a long time restaurateur and food writer Bill Granger was someone we Brits could only admire from his luscious home-style cookbooks, with their pleasingly achievable recipes. But now he's over here, living in London, with his wife and business partner, Natalie, and their three girls, Edie, Ines and Bunny.

So why the big move? "I think it was a bit of a midlife crisis thing," says Granger. "Most people with growing families move to the country – we decided to move to one of the busiest cities in the world." He also counts London's booming foodie scene as a reason: "It feels like a really exciting time for restaurants, particularly in the capital, and food producers in the UK. I wanted to spend some time here and get a real feeling of what was happening before I strode in and started doing my own thing."

Granger feels he is turning over a new leaf with the move. "I've tried to reconnect with my creative side," he says. "I've been cooking more instinctively again." His new book, Bill's Basics, is a reflection of this. It's a one-stop manual of all the unfussy, much-loved recipes he has become famous for. He is also making a TV series and has plans to open his own restaurant in London soon.

With this last project he wants to go back to basics, too. "I'd like to open a little kitchen and dining room, somewhere that's very pared down and not over-designed. I want that excitement of opening somewhere that's close to my heart again, somewhere I feel really passionate about." He couldn't have chosen a better place to do it.

• Bill's Basics (Quadrille, £25 ) is out on 3 September; Bill Granger's new TV show will be on the Good Food Channel in the autumn

The form of Duck-and-Cover produces the big box logo from a Google-Earth point of view, and a verdant garden at street-level, image courtesy RSAUD

Starting this Sunday, August 29, when the Venice Biennale opens (and runs through November 21), there will be a lot of chatter about what feeds architecture and design thinking in 2010. Here, we’re kicking off the discussion with a look behind the scenes at the U.S. Pavilion. Its curators, Jonathan D. Solomon and Michael Rooks named their show Workshopping: An American Model of Architectural Practice. The title, they say, is meant to evoke our “can-do mentality”. Solomon, acting head of the department of architecture at the University of Hong Kong, for instance, starts his catalog essay by recalling the work of engineers who figured out how to save the Apollo 13 mission, urging architects to act as “initiators” who collaborate with other professionals to create a “charged atmosphere of solution-finding”. Could this be Horatio Alger meets Bob the Builder? No, it’s more like a call to action to solve some fierce, global problems: flooding, sprawl, lack of housing, poor access to fresh food and clean air. I spoke to Solomon and Rooks, who is Wieland Family curator of modern and contemporary art at Atlanta’s High Museum, just as they were about to fly to Venice to mount the show.

How do you define “workshopping”? How is that different from collaboration?

Jonathan D. Solomon We use the word workshopping to define architect-initiated collaborations that advance in the spirit of problem-defining as well solution-finding. This way of working privileges research, social engagement, and private initiative for public benefit. It empowers architects to take on the needs of the city. While workshopping, like all architecture, requires collaboration between multiple disciplines, it sees architects as initiators and leaders of these collaborations.

Why did you choose the particular participants? What aspect of their work fit the exhibition?

JDS We wanted this exhibition be a conversation, so we chose exhibitors who would be able to set off each other’s differences rather than take refuge in their similarities. We gathered a geographically, ideologically, and generationally diverse group who represent seven very different approaches to practice in the American city.

The Mobile Food Collective, Image courtesy Archeworks.

Michael Rooks ArcheWorks is the alternative design school in Chicago, New York’s Terreform is the research NGO founded by Michael Sorkin, and cityLAB is a UCLA think tank. They are examples of hybrid institutions that see the city as a territory for working out social and cultural problems of our day. The projects range in focus from resource management to social sustainability, from post-urban public space to affordable housing.

New York City (Steady) State, Terreform, New York, NY Michael Sorkin

Guy Nordenson’s team of professionals and institutions from a variety of fields combines research, analysis, and design, which becomes the foundation for proposing solutions to rising sea levels in New York and New Orleans. Their collaboration, under the team’s leadership, transcends any one purview.

Mississippi Delta: Construction with Water: A collaboration between Princeton University and the Coastal Sustainability Studio at Louisiana State University Guy Nordenson and Associates, Catherine Seavitt Studio, Anthony Fontenot, and the LSU Coastal Sustainability Studio.

John Portman & Associates epitomize the model of a practice where the architect acts as designer and developer. By working in both public and private spheres the Portman office has been able produce truly transformative results like bringing their home city, Atlanta, into the 20th century. More importantly the model of space the firm invented in the 1960s—the continuous private interior for public use—has in this century become a model for development worldwide, especially in Asia.

Peachtree Center, Atrium Interior Copyright 1985 Jaime Ardiles-Arce

JDS Walter Hood runs a small landscape architecture firm in Berkeley along principles of community participation, while maintaining the authorship and expertise of the architect. His approaches are radical; we are showing a model that his office built to be carried out into the site so that anyone passing by could leave comments on post-it notes. Then the model comes back in and new iterations are prepared.

Greenprint, the Hill (Pittsburgh, PA), Perspectives along Centre Avenue. Image courtesy Hood Design.

MOS, a young and dynamic office from New York City, is engaged in rethinking architectural solutions from the ground up. Asked to conceive an installation for the pavilion’s open courtyard that would encourage social interactions, they proposed a canopy of reflective Mylar balloons tethered to nylon straps. Like their installation at PS1 last summer, the Biennale’s Instant Untitled envisions not only new structures and uses for materials, but new ideas about what public space in the city can be: temporary, a little precarious, ecstatic.

Rendering of Instant Untitled, a new site-specific installation for the courtyard of the American Pavilion at the 12th International Architecture Biennale. Image courtesy of MOS.

MR What binds these diverse practices together is a shared conviction and commitment to better the city, and shared willingness to re imagine the practice of architecture, if necessary, from scratch.

Christopher Hawthorne (one of cityLAB’s board members) recently wrote an essay called “Credit” in which he points out that many architects refer to the importance of “collaboration” but, at the end of the day, are not at ease sharing the limelight. Would you say that Hawthorne’s assessment is an accurate one? If so, is it one that’s changing?

JDS I would be inclined to turn this around and say that architects need to be even more aggressive about being recognized for the work they do, especially when in a collaboration. We need to respect our profession as the leader of the building industry, if we expect others to respect us. A basic principle of this stance is to insist on being recognized for our unique contributions. Workshopping requires architects to take responsibility for the solutions they propose. How can they do this if they are not recognized for the contribution they make?

MR For example, if you look at what cityLAB has brought to Venice, you’ll find a rich lineage (they call it their Operating System) for the architectural project mapped out on the wall: They document how the project was initiated, how is it supported, how is it researched, and eventually how is it designed. The architect is, and should be, identified among all the professionals in this process.

JDS This is another way in which we would differentiate workshopping from a typical collaboration, which tends to be accompanied by the flattening out individual contributions in order to recognize collective effort. We are very interested in the different forms of hierarchies that different forms of practices employ. To compare the cityLAB Operating System with the organizational charts for John Portman & Associates for instance, is fabulously illuminating.

Please explain what you mean by architect-initiator. Do you think an architect is better suited to be initiator of such collaborations than, say, an urban planner?

MR Our exhibitors include architects, landscape architects, engineers and academics. The kind of initiative we admire is hardly the province of architects alone.

JDS Architecture, by its nature, is collaborative, and architects receive one of the broadest educations available, which positions them well to work in this way. Architecture creates excellent conditions for workshopping but what really matters is the initiative.

How is workshopping American? Or how is it an American model?

JDS We are very sensitive about this title! In fact, in Venice, we are taking every step to open up our conversation to a global context, and we are finding a good degree of agreement amongst our colleagues that this type of work in the city can take place in North America much more readily than in, say, Europe or Asia. This is not to say that these practices could not flourish elsewhere, but they would have to overcome significant obstacles that conditions elsewhere—political, regulatory, cultural—may not be friendly toward.

MR It is our responsibility as curators not simply to select our country’s most talented or accomplished architects, but to put forward the proposition that the United States offers something unique to the global community. We humbly present workshopping in Venice as an American model, with the hope that the international community can benefit from the work we’re showing.

Angela Starita is a writer living in Brooklyn. She recently went back to school to study the work of architect Lina Bo Bardi.

From The Mayors Office: Mayor Billy Kenoi was among eight U.S. mayors selected to attend the 47th National Session of the Mayors’ Institute on City Design, August 4-6, 2010, in Los Angeles. The event was a National Endowment for the Arts leadership initiative in partnership with the American Architectural Foundation and the United States Conference [...]

In the center of Charlottesville's most shameful acts from the 20th century sits the Jefferson School. Symbol of segregation? Check. Survivor of Vinegar Hill urban renewal that cleared out an African-American community in the 1960s? Yep. Reminder that Charlottesville closed its schools rather than admit black children during massive resistance in 1958? Right.

Vintage school building falling silently into decrepitude while sitting on four acres of primo real estate, ripe for development? Yes.

But that's where the city and a dozen volunteers say the story veers from historical precedent, that the sale of the property will not be an Omni 2, in which the city pumped over $11 million to private interests.

The story of the sale of the Jefferson School to a group that wants to preserve it as the center of African-American history in the city sounds almost too good to be true, particularly given Charlottesville's history of taxpayer-funded giveaways.

So when the city sells a property valued at $10 million to a private company for the nominal sum of $100,000 (a price actually coming out of nearly $6 million handed to the project from city coffers), how can this be a good deal for the community? The Hook finds out.

Old schools

The former McGuffey School is leased out to artists. The former Lane High School is now known as the Albemarle County Office Building. But the Jefferson School, taken out of service by the city eight years ago, has been sitting empty and in disrepair, except for housing some city maintenance staff and the Carver Recreation Center.

What to do with the Jefferson School is a conundrum that has flummoxed the city for almost a decade. 

And to understand why the city rebuffed a plan to sell it to a developer to turn it into condos, it helps to understand the history of the Jefferson School and its predecessors, which date back to the end of the Civil War when the New England Freedman's Aid Society sent teacher Anna Gardner to open a school for former slaves in 1865. That one-room school housed in the Delavan Hospital Unit became the first Jefferson School, according to a report for the National Register of Historic Places. By 1869, a second school was built on West Main near the train depot, and that Jefferson School was one of the earliest public schools in Virginia.

In its third incarnation, the Jefferson Graded School moved to its current location on Fourth and Commerce Streets in 1894. By 1922, the eight-room school was bursting at the seams with 694 African-American students who were not allowed to attend the same schools where white children learned their ABCs, according to the Jefferson School task force report to City Council in 2004.

 African-American parents petitioned the Charlottesville School Board to provide a high school for their teenagers, and  in 1926 construction began on the Jefferson High School beside the Graded School. Before that, black students had to leave Charlottesville to get a high school education. As for the chance for them to attend Mr. Jefferson's University, that didn't happen until 1950, still more than a couple of decades away.

Newcomers probably know Vinegar Hill as an independent movie theater. They may not realize that where Staples and McDonald's and lots of asphalt are located was once a thriving African-American community with black-owned businesses and its own school. True, its public library was called the Colored Branch Library and was basically the school library with an outside entrance 

That was the reality of the Jim Crow era. Everyone who was black went to Jefferson. One of the later additions to Jefferson School was the gymnasium built in 1959, an attempt to demonstrate that poorly funded black schools were "separate but equal." (That notion also spurred the construction of Burley High School on Rose Hill Drive in 1951.)

When Charlottesville closed Lane High and Venable Elementary in 1958 under massive resistance, it was because students from Jefferson School had sued for admission to those white schools in the wake of 1954's Brown v. Board of Education.

And by the time Jefferson School closed in 2002, it stood as a symbol of a long march to equality and to the determination of Charlottesville's African-American citizens to educate their children. But this bricks-and-mortar symbol needed millions of dollars worth of rehab, and that spurred creation of a private group charged with keeping history alive.

 The deal

When City Council meets August 16, it will vote to give a second one-year option (the first recently expired) to the Jefferson School Community Partnership LLLP, a private company consisting of 12 citizens that Council asked to buy the school. The second reading of the ordinance allowing conveyance of the historic school was originally set for August 2, but that had to be pushed back because too many councilors were out of town, and selling public property in Virginia requires a super-majority, in this case at least four out of five councilors.

Council City appears ready to throw in another .187 acre from the adjacent City Yard.

"I have full confidence in the people in this partnership," says Mayor Dave Norris, about the group that includes former councilors Kendra Hamilton and Julian Taliaferro. "It's very heartening to see this come together."

Along with the cheapo price tag, Charlottesville also pledges nearly $5.8 million to the Partnership through the Charlottesville Economic Development Authority. The money is ostensibly a loan, although city spokesman Ric Barrick says until the final deal is inked, it would be more accurate to call the money a grant, and it can be used for acquisition of the school, according to the agreement between the city and CEDA. 

Why is the city paying a private partnership millions to take a school worth millions?

"Because it makes the project eligible for tax credits," explains Norris. "Otherwise it would cost us millions of dollars to renovate it."

There's widespread agreement that the project would not have been possible without tax credits, those instruments of the large-incomed that can turn, say, a planned super-subdivision named Biscuit Run into a state park. 

But tax credits aren't available to nonprofits, and that's why City Council had to ask 12 citizens to form a limited liability partnership. And once the school is sold and the property held for five years, technically there's nothing to prevent the partnership from selling the school, although everyone involved insists that won't happen.

Dan Gecker is widely described as a tax credit expert. A lawyer and Chesterfield County supervisor, he has consulted on projects such as the former Cloverleaf Mall in Chesterfield and on Western State Hosital, a.k.a. The Villages condos, in Staunton, and he helped the Partnership secure $5.76 million from CEDA, as well as a 75,000-square-foot building and 4.1 acres of land. Gecker did not return a reporter's telephone calls.

The option agreement demands the partnership "rehabilitate the structure in accordance with the Secretary of the Interior's Standards for Rehabilitation," a requirement for tax credit eligibility. An African-American cultural center has long loomed large on the wish list for the property, and the city expresses that desire in the sales contract, but acknowledges that the desire is not legally binding. 

After the 21,000-square-foot Carver Recreation Center is renovated, the Partnership will lease it back to the city. The Jefferson School African-American Heritage Center gets more than 9,000 square feet, and 21,000 square feet of space will be rented to nonprofits, with the Jefferson Area Board for Aging and the Piedmont Virginia Community College already eager to lease.

The renovation

The $17.3 million project anticipates collecting at least $4.8 million in federal and state tax credits and needs an $11-million loan on top of the city's $5.8 million subsidy, according to a recent presentation to City Council. Architectural plans have been drawn up by Bushman Dreyfus, and the construction will be handled by Stonehaus, a development company whose VP, Frank Stoner, is a member of the Partnership. Everything has been competitively bid, members of the Partnership tell a reporter on a recent tour of the building.

"We're really just trying to cover our cost," says Stoner. "Think of the alternative: the city has to do this themselves using city funds, no tax credits, no community involvement. It would cost $5 to $6 million more. So this it a better deal for the city."

One other consideration: right now, though appraised at $10.8 million, the city collects no property tax from the site. Once it's sold to the Jefferson School Community Partnership, the property is slated to move onto the tax rolls.

The partnership has to hold onto the property for five years to take advantage of the tax credits, and at the end of that time, the company will transfer to the Jefferson School Heritage Foundation, say Partnership members.

Craig Barton is an architecture and urban design professor at UVA, and he's served on the city's Planning Commission and Board of Architectural Review. Like Stoner, he originally got involved as member of something called the Jefferson School Task Force, and he's now one of the dozen soon-to-be-owners. He extols the planned two-level parking garage and dramatic landscaping, not to mention new heating, electrical, and plumbing.

"The site is getting the most dramatic change, mostly from the inside," says Barton. "From the outside, the building will look the same."

Barton, who relishes renovating to federal standards, points to the wooden seats installed in the auditorium in the 1950s. The federal guidelines require that two rows remain, but the rest can be removed to offer more flexibility to the space. Same with the painted-over 1920s windows in the auditorium, which will remain rather than be replaced.

"The demolition here is more surgical," says Barton.

The auditorium is in the oldest section of the school with its original entrance on Commerce Street, and that part will become the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center.

"The Heritage Center is really the anchor," says Barton. "Without it, the project would founder."

Building a Heritage Center

Despite the difficult economic climate and a tourism malaise that has brought attendance figures at such Virginia mainstays as Monticello and Colonial Williamsburg (the latter of which had its worst year in the past 47) down from their historic highs, Andrea Douglas doesn't see any obstacles to creating the Jefferson School African-American Heritage Center.

"I'm a glass half-full person," says Douglas, who's curator of the University Art Museum.

"You've got Monticello writing one part of local history, you've got UVA writing another part," says Douglas. "The African-American cultural center will write the third part. It is an urban story that I feel hasn't been told in an institutional framework anywhere in Charlottesville."

Some artifacts like yearbooks, diplomas, the school clock, as well as issues of the school newspaper, The Jeffersonian, have already been donated. "We're still looking for artifacts," says Douglas. "We hope people will look in their attics."

But the biggest artifact, she notes,  is the school itself.

"There's a performance venue that historically was a central venue for the African-American community," she says. "We plan to take advantage of that." She also anticipates partnerships with other organizations in the community.

The Heritage Center isn't just a museum, Douglas points out, but a niche opportunity that may contain a genealogy center as well as classes in visual and performing arts.

"It's not just an exhibition space," she says. "It's a cultural center. We expect it to be extremely viable. It could be the connection between downtown and the university."

The center will be a 501 (3)(c) nonprofit. It has plans to hire a director, curator, and program education person, and while it's received some funding, Douglas says she isn't prepared to talk about its budget. 

Legendary civil rights activist Eugene Williams is not so convinced about the viability of the Heritage Center. Unless it's somehow tied to Monticello, the area's biggest tourist draw, he brands it "lip service" to the African-American community.

Monticello, the mountain-top plantation home of Thomas Jefferson, has become a world-renowned cultural site with 452,000 visitors last year. Williams fears that unless the Heritage Center gets linked to Monticello, it's doomed to obscurity--- and economic failure.

Ambitious Richmonders got a taste of that in the mid-1990s when a history center called "Valentine Riverside" opened along the James River at the old Tredegar Ironworks. Despite millions in public and private funding, the experiment ended in a $22 million financial failure when crowds failed to materialize. Williams worries that once the city's population of 40,000 has seen the Heritage Center, traffic could dry up.

"If the African-American cultural center generates no income at all, it will become a liability and converted to something else," predicts Williams. "I can see it with no open hours, no director. It becomes a liability and is turned into something commercial-- and it's already zoned for that." 

Williams notes the recently approved change in zoning from B-1 to B-2, ostensibly to allow an on-site café, could also allow a switch to full-blown commerce. He derides the "spot zoning" that's historically been done in black neighborhoods, and lists the firehouse, Salvation Army and Noland plumbing as examples of spot zoning on Ridge Street that he feels have damaged the neighborhood.

Douglas, however, portrays the Heritage Center less as a "one-stop venue" and more of a "value-add" to Monticello by telling the story of what happened to those people who were once slaves on the mountain. "They moved down the hill and created Vinegar Hill and Starr Hill neighborhoods," she says.

What Douglas and Williams agree upon: The center has to be tied into the larger community.

"The Jefferson School was at the heart of the African-American community," says Douglas, "and I believe it can be the heart of the greater community."

The art of (understanding) the deal

Turning the publicly owned Jefferson School into the privately owned Jefferson School City Center requires a complicated option, sale, fund-raising, and ongoing operation to make it happen.

What's to prevent it from turning into a commercial project down the road depends only on the word of the people involved. After all, the option agreement about to be inked between the city and Partnership explicitly acknowledges that the city cannot legally require the Partnership to open the Heritage Center.

"I just don't see that happening," says Genevieve Keller, an architectural historian and preservation planner, and one of the Jefferson School 12. As a lifelong Charlottesville resident, she remembers growing up in in a segregated city and watching Jefferson School students walking to and from school because there was no bus.

'We have worked very hard to bring this to fruition," says Keller, who thinks this use of rehabilitation tax credits will serve as a model. "That's innovative," she says, "this public-private partnership." 

And the Department of Historic Resources lists other examples of public buildings transformed through private efforts. Kenbridge High School in Lunenberg County is now the Kenbridge Community Center. A private foundation has turned the Workhouse in Lorton into an arts center, and the historic Moton School in Farmville-- launchpad for one of the major legal cases that became Brown v. Board-- is planning a tax credit project, says Elizabeth Tune at the Department.

"I feel much better about it now that it has evolved," says local NAACP chapter president Rick Turner, who has been involved in strategies for the school since 2002. Turner says he's impressed with the caliber of people on the board of the Heritage Center. "The strongest piece is the cultural component," he says. 

Still, some citizens who've been around a long time, like Eugene Williams, call it a "giveaway," and wonder whether local blacks will benefit. And for those who recall the razing of the Vinegar Hill community under the guise of urban renewal, the city's plans for Jefferson School raise myriad questions.

"The city has made numerous mistakes," says Sherman White, journalist with the Charlottesville-Albemarle Tribune, a black newspaper. Mentioning the sales of Lane and Burley high schools to Albemarle County as dubious decisions on par with the city's pledge to give up the right to annexation, White also notes a seeming paucity of black faces at the Charlottesville tourism centers.

"Why is it everything that's good for the African-American community makes money for the white community?" he asks.

However, others reject the notion that the partnership members, citizens invited by City Council to oversee the rehabilitation, will profit.

"The people involved are receiving no return," says attorney Steve Blaine, who has represented developers like Hunter Craig, developments like the Landmark Hotel, as well as wine-development couple Bill Moses and Patricia Kluge. "We are volunteers taking time to oversee this project." Blaine also has spent time serving on the Charlottesville Housing Authority.

"It would be a more interesting story if there was a subplot," Blaine acknowledges. "When you get asked by community leaders, it's hard to say no."

The return, says Blaine, will be a "perpetual community center," and he disputes any notion that the conveyance constitutes a giveaway.

"That question about the partners selling off the property--- well, it stings after two years of busting our butts," says former city councilor and Partnership member Kendra Hamilton, who offers her thoughts on whether the deal is good for the city.

"A good deal for the city would have been selling to Chuck Lewis a decade ago and cashing in on 10 years of tax revenue," she says.

"The reason we've gone through this tortuous process is because a group of little old lady schoolteachers from Jefferson, now in their 70s and 80s, said hold on here--- this is the only place in town remaining where you can tell the story of black Charlottesville, of black folks in Central Virginia and what we went through," Hamilton writes in an email. "In their vision, Jefferson was to be a public trust and a public resource for everybody.

"And that's why the partners are doing this--- you would not believe the hours of work people have put in designing the financing structure, recruiting just the right mix of tenants, not to mention designing the program of activities at the cultural center. Not for hope of personal profit, but because--- for each and every one of us to varying degrees--- these little old ladies... they got to us... But then, that's why we were chosen by City Council rather than another group of folks with a similar skill set--- because we were more likely than another group to 'get it' and commit for the long haul to something that was so abstract but that was also so clearly 'the right thing.'" 

#

by Breaking Through Concrete team.

 

For the final stop on the Breaking Through Concrete tour, we’re gettin’ all peri-urban on y’all.

It takes almost an hour to drive from downtown Chicago north on I-94 to the town of Grayslake, Ill., home of the Prairie Crossing residential development—“A Conservation Community”—and its core farm, Sandhill Organics. Though billboards, office “parks,” and standard Interstate culture dot the highway, the tall, mixed prairie grasses native to these Great Lake Plains become increasingly expansive.

The approach from the interstate to Prairie Crossing tells a modern American story. A natural lake with tree snags, lily pads, and marsh grasses covers a depression between a rim of trees and wild, hip-high grasses. A mile down the road, a fresh slab of pavement holds a large parking lot and a shopping center with chain stores. Then more open land, some large cornfields, and a walled development of cookie-cutter homes with multiple pitched roofs, elaborate garages, and lots of short, non-native grass to mow.

If you’ve been following this series, you’re surely familiar with the lament over lost farmland replaced by shoddily designed and developed, uniformly average orgies of square-footage known as the modern American house. It sounds elitist—probably is—but it’s true and, unfortunately, it’s happening and it will continue happening for a while, at least, because the American dream for many people remains cars that get driven all day, double-vaulted ceilings in the foyer, your own lawn to mow, and safety in homogeny.

As long as we’re critiquing, Prairie Crossing has its place in this suburbanization of the rural world. It is a planned community of large homes that only a certain economic strata can afford, and it plowed over some prairie land to make it happen.

But now the good part.

Prairie Crossing was developed to conserve prairie, and it’s not just a marketing slogan. Vicky and George Ranney, the developers, set aside 60 percent of the 677 acres in a land conservation easement; another 3,200 acres are protected within the Liberty Prairie Reserve, a conglomeration of public and private land connected to the community.

From the beginning, the Ranneys believed in agriculture as an essential component, so they established 100 acres strictly for growing food. “This land was always farmland,” says Vicky. “So we considered what people would like to live next to. We realized that sooner or later, there’d be a conflict between big agriculture and residential developments. People wouldn’t find it comfortable to live next to pesticides and chemicals.”

The mixture worked. They sold all the homes (about 400), and at a rate 34 percent above the market for the similarly sized developments and homes in the area. The farm is one of Prairie Crossing’s many differentiating factors—native grasses encouraged to grow wild in front yards, a charter school with an experiential curriculum located on-site and open to the entire county, geothermal heating, open land, trails, a swimming lake, and a light-rail city connection make good selling points as well. It also has large-scale, intensive, integrated produce and livestock farm that marks a huge leap for peri-urban growth. Just a few years ago, even the most progressive projects looked at small “playscapes” or raised-bed community garden plots as radical green space. A hundred acres of organic, production farmland distinguishes Prairie Crossing and gives it a place in the urban farm puzzle—albeit as a variation.

Prairie Crossing is one of the earliest examples of what architect and planner Andrés Duany calls “Agricultural Urbanism.” Duany, along with others, has created a movement in the planning, developing, and architectural world with his New Urbanism model for sustainable design on a wildly big-picture level. New Urbanism wants to create a new language for coding and zoning and design practices, so that the builders of communities, cities, even regions can look more like traditional communities that were less about the automobile and more about living smaller, more densely, more neighborly, and with less societal and environmental impact.

A new chapter in the discussion is this idea of Agricultural Urbanism. Duany differentiates agricultural urbanism from urban agriculture in simple terms: agricultural urbanism creates the walkable urban form surrounded by agriculture, whereas urban agriculture is simply growing food on vacant lots and in backyards. He cites Detroit as a hub of urban agriculture but not Agricultural Urbanism, but he’d call Prairie Crossing the latter.

Peg and Matt Sheaffer grow most of the food. They came into Prairie Crossing early, as the original farmers for Sandhill Organics. The Ranneys offered to lease them 45 acres of certified organic farmland. The Sheaffers moved into the farmhouse and they’ve made it a thriving business, thanks to CSA membership and Chicago farmers market sales. They make a lot more money per acre—roughly $20,000 per acre—than the mono-crop farmers who dominate the rest of Illinois, who average  roughly $800 per acre.

There’s an additional 50 acres of farmland at Prairie Crossing, some of which is used by the Learning Farm project for youth programs, from elementary students to a diverse corps of high schoolers from all over the county who work under the guidance of staff and a few college interns. And in the “back 40” of the property, four “incubator farms” grow produce and raise pigs and chickens. Part of the Farm Business Development Center, these young farmers get the chance to take a stab at creating a viable, profitable farm business. When they’re ready, they leave to create their own independent farms.

Prairie Crossing is a farm that grows farms and farmers.

So how does this work? And why doesn’t it happen more often?

Mike Sands, executive director for the Liberty Prairie Foundation, has some insight. He was previously the managing director of the Rodale Institute, a 63-year-old organization dedicated to organic agriculture research and education.

“True urban farms are incredibly important,” says Mike. “But if you consider food productivity potential, they’re limited. I do think we’re ready for that next generation of urban farming—using waste heat to power year-round production. The urban farm can provide supplemental production, but its real value is as an entry point to food quality and why that matters. And it improves its immediate community—aesthetically and psychologically.

The challenge presented by Sandhill Organics, he says, is not only the diverse, integrated growing, but the marketing and financial planning involved: “We don’t have those farmers. If you offered $20,000 per acre to an average farmer, they’d likely say they couldn’t handle that. [Matt and Peg and the incubator farmers] are entrepreneurs who pick farming as their business, not people who say they want to be a farmer.”

He sees successful farmers coming from four groups: Liberal arts grads, people in mid-career changes, recent immigrants, and the conventional farmer who has failed—whose farm is in foreclosure or close to it, who’s been forced by a catastrophic event in the system to look at alternatives.

Here’s Mike discussing the peri-urban model and its role in the scheme for feeding cities.

And so maybe this is the best place to end. A recurring question throughout our exploration of American urban farms has been “Which came first, the City or the Farm?” It is perhaps a rhetorical question, more like a riddle with a few answers. But here we are in the middle of the two, a mile from hard-core modern-American farmland and all its flaws, and an hour from one of the country’s biggest cities.

The land is here, and the knowledge and fervor for the new age of farming seems to be creeping out of the city toward it, looking for more acres and new ways to make an independent living off the land. Sounds like the good ole American way.

Related Links:

Part 1 of interview with local-food economist Ken Meter [PODCAST]

Chicagoans get new roots and second chances from Growing Home farm

Beekeepers add buzz to Japanese urban jungle

Designing With Plants Piet Oudolf and Noel Kingsbury

Timber Press ISBN 978-0-88192-953-9

We live in historic times, horticultural, that is. The most forward-looking and inspiring garden designer of the 21^st century is Piet Oudolf, based in the Netherlands but working world wide, and responsible for a historic shift in the appearance of contemporary landscapes. His work is both riveting and controversial and pushes the boundaries of modernity in the garden. Noel Kingsbury, an eminent garden designer and garden writer, wrote this book in 1999 to explain Oudolf’s work to a wider audience. Eleven years later, it is as timely and relevant as it was when it was first published.

The signature of an Oudolf landscape is the deconstruction of the formal garden, reconstituted with influences from the meadow garden. Oudolf had found the formal garden too stifling and the meadow garden too messy. The resulting gardens that he created include design features from both styles that are revolutionary in concept and breathtaking to behold.

The essence of an Oudolf style garden is five -fold: First, is the ruthless and thorough selection of wild or lush looking plants, arranged in formal patterns. Second, is the painterly and architectural role played by flower heads, both when in bloom and when spent, and thirdly, is the deliberate twisting of the axis of symmetry that leads the eye to the ends of the flowerbeds, thereby drawing the viewer deeper into the mood of the garden. Fourth, is the use of ornamental grasses to supply structure to the over all design and lastly, is a directive to leave spent perennials uncut during winter, thereby allowing the plants to contribute visual interest all season long. It is Oudolf’s belief that cutting down perennials in winter is absurd. It is no more than rigid folklore with little foundation. Furthermore, he holds that most of what is written about gardening, in the English language, is mere dogma based on principles of safe harmonies. Oudolf encourages gardeners to be adventurous and create their own rules, much in the same way that many American gardeners have been doing for quite some time. According to Kingsbury, perpetuating British gardening traditions reflects a backward looking mentality.

An Oudolf garden begins with a planting palette made up of form, leaves and color. Design schemes are created by combing forms, colors, structure, adding filler plants, grasses and umbellifers. The design is further enhanced with repetition and rhythm. Mood is created with light, movement and harmony. Finally, the year round visual interest of plants from their infancy to their death is another dominant element.

This is not a garden design book for the beginner. It is predicated on an accumulated knowledge of the behavior of perennials and grasses. Some familiarity with traditional styles of garden design will help the reader to appreciate the botanical brilliance that is Piet Ouldolf.

Gardeners that have already attempted medium or large scale garden designs will find these revolutionary ideas easy to understand and moderately challenging to adopt. At the least, they are exciting. Although this reviewer discovered Designing with Plants eleven years after it was published, it has been a worthwhile and mind-expanding experience. No garden designer should remain uninformed about Piet Oudolf.

In addition to reading this book, gardeners who would like to gain an even deeper understanding of Oudolf are recommended to scroll through the blog grounded design written by landscape architect Thomas Reiner. In his posting of April 6, 2010, titled Secrets of the Highline Revealed, Mr. Reiner describes how Oudolf uses a layered matrix planting to achieve his original designs. Mr., Reiner’s explanations enriches Mr. Kingsbury's book.

Designing With Plants Piet Oudolf and Noel Kingsbury

Timber Press ISBN 978-0-88192-953-9

We live in historic times, horticultural, that is. The most forward-looking and inspiring garden designer of the 21^st century is Piet Oudolf. Based in the Netherlands but working world wide, he is responsible for a historic shift in the appearance of contemporary landscapes. His work is both riveting and controversial and pushes the boundaries of modernity in the garden. Noel Kingsbury, an eminent garden designer and garden writer, co-wrote this book with Oudolf in 1999 to explain Oudolf’s work to a wider audience. Eleven years later, it is as timely and relevant as it was when it was first published.

The signature of an Oudolf landscape is the deconstruction of the formal garden, reconstituted with influences from the meadow garden. Oudolf had found the formal garden too stifling and the meadow garden too messy. The resulting gardens that he created include design features from both styles that are revolutionary in concept and breathtaking to behold.

Five elements contribute to an Oudolf-style garden: First, is the ruthless and thorough selection of wild or lush looking plants, arranged in formal patterns. Second, is the painterly and architectural role played by flower heads, both blooming and spent, and thirdly, is the deliberate twisting of the axis of symmetry that leads the eye to the ends of the flowerbeds, thereby drawing the viewer deeper into the mood of the garden. Fourth, is the use of ornamental grasses to supply structure to the over all design and lastly, is a directive to leave spent perennials uncut during winter, thereby allowing the plants to contribute visual interest all season long. It is Oudolf’s belief that cutting down perennials in winter is absurd. It is no more than rigid folklore with little foundation. Furthermore, he holds that most of what is written about gardening, in the English language, is mere dogma based on principles of safe harmonies. Oudolf encourages gardeners to be adventurous and create their own rules, much in the same way that many American gardeners have been doing for quite some time. According to Kingsbury, perpetuating British gardening traditions reflects a backward looking mentality.

An Oudolf garden begins with a planting palette made up of form, leaves and color. Design schemes are created by combing forms, colors, structure, adding filler plants, grasses and umbellifers. The design is further enhanced with repetition and rhythm. Mood is created with light, movement and harmony. Finally, the year round visual interest of plants from their infancy to their death is another dominant element.

This is not a garden design book for the beginner. It is predicated on an accumulated knowledge of the behavior of perennials and grasses. Some familiarity with traditional styles of garden design will help the reader to appreciate the botanical brilliance that is Piet Ouldolf.

Gardeners that have already attempted medium or large scale garden designs will find these revolutionary ideas easy to understand and moderately challenging to adopt. At the least, they are exciting. Although this reviewer discovered Designing with Plants eleven years after it was published, it has been a worthwhile and mind-expanding experience. No garden designer should remain uninformed about Piet Oudolf.

In addition to reading this book, gardeners who would like to gain an even deeper understanding of Oudolf are recommended to scroll through the blog grounded design written by landscape architect Thomas Reiner. In his posting of April 6, 2010, titled Secrets of the Highline Revealed, Mr. Reiner describes how Oudolf uses a layered matrix planting to achieve his original designs. Mr., Reiner’s explanations enriches Mr. Kingsbury’s book.

The Richard Morris Hunt Fellowship is an intensive six-month scholarship opportunity that provides practicing preservation architects a $25,000 stipend to pursue research related to American and French architectural heritage and historic preservation practices. The American Architectural Foundation and the French Heritage Society established the Hunt Fellowship in 1990 to foster cross-cultural

For over 25 years, John and Pat Henek have been the team behind the unique designs of Heartland House. Many designs are based on the work of Frank Lloyd Wright, the "Father of American Architecture". The Heneks live in Wright's home town of Oak Park, Illinois. Heartland House is the exclusive source for needlework adaptations from art glass, architectural elements, decorative designs, and magazine covers found in the Wright Foundation archives. Learn more about Heartland House.

Visit the Heartland House website to learn more about the Heller House Window Sampler featured here.

More blogs posts featuring photos on Wordless Wednesday at About.com.

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Japanese architect and artist whose challenging designs tilted at mortality

The Japanese architect and artist Shusaku Arakawa believed that it was immoral for people to have to die. With his wife, Madeline Gins, he designed houses and public spaces that were supposed to help stop us from ageing. His death, at the age of 73, is a flaw in his philosophy of transhumanism, or reversible destiny. "This mortality thing is bad news," Gins said after he died, adding that she would now increase her efforts to prove that "ageing can be outlawed".

For Arakawa and Gins, the ideal form of a house was one that kept residents in a "perpetually tentative relationship with their surroundings". The more our homes challenge us, architecturally, the more likely we are to stay young, grappling with their complexities and, in the case of Arakawa and Gins's flats and houses, their sheer oddity – even perversity.

Their most extreme design, the Bioscleave house (2008), in East Hampton, Long Island, New York, took eight years to build and cost the couple $2m of their own money. Before this colourful and bewildering home was finished, Arakawa and Gins lost the small fortune that they had accumulated since the early 1960s. They had invested money through Bernard Madoff, the American conman they had met at an art exhibition in New York, and the resulting loss led them to close their office in Manhattan.

The Bioscleave house boasted at least three dozen shades of paint. The building features sloping floors in the guise of cartoon-like sand dunes, windows placed where no window is normally placed, level changes aimed at conveying a feeling of being in two places at once, no doors, no privacy, curiously shaped rooms and any number of other surrealist tricks.

The house was designed to keep residents and visitors on their toes – they are hard pushed to even remain vertical. A number of floor-to-ceiling poles were provided, which can be grasped if the inevitable sense of disorientation gets a bit too much.

These curious devices were intended to stimulate us in ways conventional homes do not. A state of comfort, according to Arakawa and Gins, creates anxiety because, although cosseting, it can only ever be finite – and thus shortens rather than prolongs life.

Arakawa rarely used his first name. He was born in Nagoya, studied maths and medicine at the University of Tokyo and attended Musashino art school in Tokyo, where he made surrealist prints. He set off for New York in 1961 with, he claimed, just $14 and the artist Marcel Duchamp's phone number in his pockets. He took a course at Brooklyn Museum art school where, in 1962, he met and married Gins, a fellow student. In 1987 they started the Containers of Mind Foundation together, which later evolved into the Architectural Body Research Foundation. These were the hard-to-place philosophical stepping-stones of their lifelong attempt to create buildings that would enable us to defy death.

They began to paint a series of 83 large paintings on the theme of the mechanism of meaning which were exhibited around the world and, over the years, paid for Arakawa and Gins' architectural experiments. To date, these are a project for a city of reversible destiny on 75 acres of Tokyo wasteland (it never happened); the Bioscleave house; and nine reversible destiny lofts in Mitaka, Tokyo, completed in 2005 at a total cost of around $6m.

The reversible destiny lofts boast colourful rooms in the form of cylinders, cubes and spheres and are known for being interesting and challenging, rather than comfortable, to live in. They are dedicated to the memory of Helen Keller, the American author and political activist who lost her sight and hearing as a child. Keller was a role model for Arakawa and Gins because by relearning how to communicate, she somehow proved that reversible destiny was possible.

The pair believed that the ideal residents of their homes should, following the same principle, be blank slates so that their experience of architecture was continually novel. In this way, explained Arakawa, they would forget that they had to die.

Arakawa had exhibitions of his work around the world, including at the Angela Flowers Gallery in London, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, Galerie Maeght in Paris and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. He also wrote poetry, animated by such thought-provoking sentiments as "when I am away from you, I feel like a watermelon seed", and "he is elegant between his toes".

He published several tantalising books with Gins, notably The Mechanism of Meaning (1971), Reversible Destiny: We Have Decided Not to Die (1997) and Making Dying Illegal (2006).

Gins survives him.

• Shusaku Arakawa, artist and architect, born 6 July 1936; died 18 May 2010

From sugary sculptures to a madcap midnight cycling tour, Jonathan Glancey rounds up 10 festival treats that promise a fresh perspective on the capital

The fourth biennial London Festival of Architecture is an enormous affair, boasting some 300 events in the West End, East End and south London between 20 June and 20 July 2010. These range from the arcane and baffling to walks and cycle rides aimed at opening up fresh perspectives of the miasmic city. I've chosen seven of the best tours (there's no better way of getting to grips with London's architecture than getting on your bike or stepping out), as well as three fixed events as different from one another as St Mary Abchurch is from 30 St Mary Axe.

Dogs for Architecture!

When I turned up to work for the first time in Canary Wharf Tower some 15 years ago, I was refused entry. A pair of jaw-jutting blokes in faux-American security outfits pointed at William, my veteran London mongrel, and said he couldn't come in. Guide dogs only, they said. This dog guides me through London (as through life), I said, hopefully. The guards only looked more aggressive. Odd, I can't help thinking, that so much modern architecture is anti-dog. My favourite City church, St Mary Abchurch, once housed a kennel-like pew especially for four-legged visitors. Luckily, dogs are still welcome in many parts of town, as well as in proper churches, pubs, cafes and offices; so it's good to see a walking tour of architecture in and around Bloomsbury aimed at dogs and their guardians. Even if your bulldog takes against the 60s brutalism of much of the University of London, or your boxer barks disapprovingly at the rebuilt Brunswick Centre, there are graceful Georgian terraces to trot past, Charles Holden's coolly enigmatic Senate House to pad through (well, the lobby anyway) and, best of all, a chance to sniff around Russell Square Gardens as well as Bedford and Bloomsbury Squares while taking in their enthralling skylines.

• Sunday 20 June, 10:30-1:00pm. Only dogs owners and well-behaved dogs need apply. £9.50/£7.50 concession. Please email tours@open-city.org.uk or telephone 0207 383 2131, Mon-Fri 9.30am-6pm (advance booking is essential).

Pimp Your Pavement!

This promises to be an eye-opening event, especially for those with green fingers. Richard Reynolds, author of On Guerrilla Gardening, will lead a 90-minute walking tour of the "guerrilla gardens" of deepest London, SE1 – not tobacco plantations founded by former Cuban revolutionaries, but pavements and urban nooks and crannies where local people have begun to plant and cultivate every spare bit of land. London's streets are in need of trees; but beans, tomatoes, marrows and potatoes (with their beautiful flowers) would make many of them more attractive, too. Central London might have lost all too many of its food markets; now, says Reynolds, it's time to take "guerrilla" action and grow our own. Reynolds would like to show you how.

• Sunday 20 June. For further details, see the Pimp Your Pavement website.

Midsummer Madness

From "Greenwich to Primrose Hill to Bankside via the deserted sleeping city and the Nash boulevards" – and starting at 2am ... This solstice bike ride, organised by Southwark Cyclists, might seem for insomniacs only, and yet this is a fine time to see central London and its architecture. The one and only time, in fact; the streets are almost quiet, and cyclists can look up at their surroundings rather than down and from side to side for raw survival's sake. There is a coffee stop at 3am at Bar Italia, Soho, still almost the only place you can buy a proper cappuccino in London, and which looks pretty much as it did when it opened in 1949. Breakfast is at the Leon bar and café, Canvey Street, immediately behind Tate Modern, which is opening at 6am, specially for cyclists on this ride.

• Monday 21 June. See the London Festival of Architecture (LFA) website for further details.

Building Skywards: Aldgate and City of London Towers

Afternoon and evening walks on three days (23, 24 and 25 June) setting off from Aldgate underground station and taking in the soaring new towers of the City. Actually, the very first of these buildings was Aldgate itself, originally a Roman gateway leading into Londinium from the busy road to Camulodunum (Colchester). Until remarkably recently, the towers and spires of the churches (rebuilt for the most part by Christopher Wren) were the City's "skyscrapers"; today these modest, if sometimes exquisite, buildings seem like toys compared with the enormous towers shooting up in honour of mammon. Sadly, for reasons of business and security, it's not possible to reach the top of the latest towers by Foster, Rogers, Grimshaw, Kohn Pedersen Fox and co, although you could end this tour with a drink in the Vertigo bar at the top of Tower 42, formerly the NatWest Tower, a 70s structural tour-de-force designed by Colonel Richard Seifert and his regiment of commercially astute architects.

• 23, 24 and 25 June. Book through the LFA website.

Birds of Bankside

From earliest childhood until a decade or so ago, one of the things I liked doing best in central London was feeding the sparrows from the bridge spanning the lake in St James's Park. Try this today, though, and you might wait all year. There are several theories as to where all the cockney sparrows have gone (their Parisian cousins appear to thrive); one of mine is that our new, or made-over, buildings are hermetic, defensive things with no nooks and crannies for sparrows to nest. You will be given a more informed answer from Peter Holden, who is leading this early morning walk around Bankside in search of birds and other London wildlife. The tour will also be taking in some new architect-designed nests by 51% Studio on behalf of the Architecture Foundation close to Tate Modern. Holden has worked for the RSPB for 30 years and is author of the authoritative and delightful RSPB Handbook of British Birds.

• Thursday 24 June. Book through the LFA website.

The Green Room

Architects in London, or those hoping to find work in London, have faced very hard times indeed over the past year or so. Few practices have got away without making staff redundant. Chetwood Architects is making a fully serviced room available to architects at its office at 12-13 Clerkenwell Green, opposite the Marx Memorial Library (where Lenin published Iskra) and the Crown Tavern (where the revolutionary was joined for a beer by a young Stalin in 1903). Up to six architects at a time will be able to use the Green Room for a week "to showcase their work, arrange/prepare for meetings and interviews in a relaxed coffee-house-style environment". Employment exchanges have never been quite so alluring. A "prominent display space in Chetwood's front window will showcase selected drawings and designs", says the practice, and given that London is always on the look-out for fresh talent, seats in the Green Room will doubtless be in great demand.

• From Thursday 24 June until a year afterwards. If you believe you have a legitimate reason to use the Green Room, contact Geoff Cunningham.

The Best of France in London with Stephen Bayley

Stephen Bayley – author, critic, curator, bon viveur – leads a bicycle ride through French-influenced London. The tour starts at Michelin House, Fulham Road, the curiously delightful and beautifully restored former headquarters of the Michelin Tyre Company designed by the engineer François Espinasse in a flouncy art nouveau style that belies its radical ferro-concrete structure. From here, Bayley (astride his single-speed, Korean-made, North American Cannondale Capo bicycle) will lead his designer team to Westminster Abbey "to see the influence of Reims, Amiens and Chartres", to the Wallace Collection and its French art and furniture, to Ernö Goldfinger's "homage to Le Corbusier" in Piccadilly (French Tourist Office, 1956), Jean Cocteau's murals in Notre Dame de France in Leicester Place, the French Church in Soho Square and One New Change, a massive new office block by Jean Nouvel in the shadow of the dome of the very English St Paul's Cathedral. Those who survive Bayley's banter and the worst of London traffic will be rewarded with champagne.

• Saturday 26 June. Book through the LFA website.

Restless Cities Walking Tour

LFA invites the adventurous on this "saccadic stroll" led by Esther Leslie, professor of political aesthetics at London's Birkbeck College. Saccadic has something to do with seeing things in a fast-cut way – you're welcome to look it up too – and I think the idea, rooted in Restless Cities, a book of essays published earlier this year by Verso, is that city life is so full of fleeting images, occurrences and ideas that it can be unnerving to walk the streets – or, of course, it can be a wonderfully mind-blowing experience. Anyone who offers you a fresh way of looking at London has to be worth 90 minutes, and I'm sure Leslie will have dreamed up ways of stirring the imaginations of anyone willing to walk on the quasi-philosophical side.

• Sunday 27 June. The LFA website offers no details, but the walk starts at 3pm in front of the Whitechapel Art Gallery.

Sugar Cube, Tate Modern

Brendan Jamison has sculpted a copy of Tate Modern in sugar cubes. This sort of thing (such as ships in bottles in Trafalgar Square, or the Forth Bridge reproduced 1:1 scale in matchsticks) is always fun. Built on a scale of 1:100 (the chimney is 3.3ft high), Tate Sweet comprises no fewer than 71,908 cubes – or 52bn individual sugar crystals – that have taken three months to assemble. Other sources tell me that these figures should be revised upwards to more than 80,000 cubes and 60m crystals. Whatever the truth, there is enough sugar here for all the tea served in London in about an hour. I think. If you would like to see how he made this extraordinary architectural confection, Jamison will be running family workshops alongside the model on Saturday 3 July (NEO Bankside pavilion, Hopton Street, opposite the Turbine Hall entrance to Tate Modern). To register for a place, contact neobankside@camronpr.com or call Hannah, Ross or Lizzie at Camron PR on 0207 420 1700. If you attend one of these, you might just want to ask Jamison why on earth he did such a thing in the first place.

1:1 – Architects Build Small Spaces

The V&A;'s contribution to LFA is this hugely enjoyable exhibition featuring seven imaginative new buildings, each one specially commissioned for the seven miles of corridors within this glorious South Kensington museum. From a fairytale Japanese teahouse on stilts to a pavilion made of geometric acrylic panels in the guise of a computer-imagined tree, here are miniature buildings designed to provoke and delight the imagination.

• At the V&A; Museum, London, until 30 August.

"It is the tension between creativity and skepticism that has produced the stunning and unexpected findings of science." --Carl Sagan

Not since the Soviets launched Sputnik into Earth's orbit in the 1960s has there been such urgency for America to redesign science and math education programs. Now, in the third millennium, the initiative takes the form of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) education. Research demonstrates that interest among American students in STEM subjects has greatly declined, a major issue given that the STEM labor force is an indicator of a nation's ability to sustain itself. The new STEM initiative will launch with a bold mission: to reengage students in the joys of learning science and mathematics at all levels of education.

The launch is well underway. In January of this year President Obama announced that $250 million would be invested in training and recruiting 100,000 new science and math teachers. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan made STEM a prerequisite for states applying for Race to the Top funding.

Workshop image courtesy of the American Architectural Foundation

In lockstep with the White House announcement, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in conjunction with the American Architectural Foundation, conducted workshops as part of a national summit on how design thinking and the design process can help to foster creative new models for STEM school development and create a framework for scaling up the STEM knowledge network. Using design thinking, workshop participants also investigated what a STEM educational environment would look like. America is investing in STEM education with money and with human capital.

Now is the time to reflect on the reasons for students' disengagement from science and technology subjects. We need to treat STEM as a pedagogical approach and design an environment to support this new way of teaching. Brian Greene, a bestselling author and theoretical physicist best known for his work in string theory, talks passionately about how we have educated the curiosity out of the math and sciences. Greene says that we have paralyzed our children with the fear of being wrong. Risk-taking and making mistakes are critical to the scientific process. This fear of being wrong has resulted in disengagement from science and mathematics: learning science and math is a drag! He makes a convincing assessment of the problems with our current science education system and stops just short of demanding a new pedagogy to bring excitement and relevance back to the learning of science and math. 

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Watch Brian Greene's talk from a recent Aspen Ideas Festival on recapturing children's innate spirit of exploration. The collision of the arts and sciences--right-brain thinkers collaborating with left-brain thinkers--helps spur new knowledge and innovation. So why are the arts left out of the STEM discussion? I would argue we need to modify STEM to become STEAM to encompass the inventive, creative characteristics embodied in the arts. By including the arts in the discussion, we also have the possibility of increasing engagement with students.

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For example, at the University of California, Santa Barbara, JoAnn Kuchera-Morin, a musician, collaborated with her scientific colleagues to create the AlloSphere--an entirely new way to visualize and hear scientific data. The Allosphere is a massive, echo-free sphere with large projection screens and surround sound that is connected to a super computer. It enables scientists to employ all of the human senses and completely submerge themselves in their most complex data and models. As Kuchera-Morin describes the phenomenon: "imagine seeing and hearing the music of the electrons spin." Words alone cannot explain the AlloSphere, you have to watch it in action.

Courtesy of crayonphysics.com and Kloonigames Ltd.

Combining the arts and sciences can take a much simpler form as well. Crayon Physics is a free web-based game that introduces children to Newton's Laws of Motion. The simple goal is to design a contraption that knocks a star off various platforms. Kids can experience, in real time, the interconnected relationship of Newton's laws as their contraption is activated and unfolds. The bigger idea is that the game allows the kids to solve puzzles by designing contraptions that are innovative, functional and beautiful. 

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What Does a STEM Environment Look and Feel Like?

It's critical to create an environment that promotes rather than hinders the collaborative human dynamic and the collision of mathematics, the sciences and the arts. To promote this collision, spaces should flow into each other to encourage children's natural tendency to explore. Do away the self-contained laboratory and let the lab atmosphere pervade a school's every nook and cranny! We should promote project-based, rather than subject-based, curricula to enable inquiry and discovery. Tinkering and prototyping rather than repetitive experimentation and testing should be the goal.

Some of the best examples of dynamic learning happen outside of school. At the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago, the "Science Storms" installation captures the sensorial, experiential joy that children discover in science. At the ground level, the space is anchored by an immense vertical installation that allows children to feel a tornado spinning. The perimeter of the installation is lined with smaller lab spaces for group learning. The labs' glass walls and sliding doors provide a visual and tangible connection to the adjacent stimulating, hands-on experiments. It is ironic that we create such amazing interactive science exhibitions that we bring our children to on special occasions rather than just building them at the schools.

For designers invested in educational spaces the challenge is obvious: we cannot simply hammer the round peg of this STEM initiative into the square hole that is the 19th century school model. Educators, scientists, architects, engineers, artists, technologists, designers and kids can collaborate to re-envision the pedagogy and the learning environment needed to support STEM. Through this design journey we will rediscover the spirit of playfulness and fun in learning science and meet the challenges of the Race to the Top.

Top image, the new "Science Storms" exhibition at Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry

Read Trung Le's blog Design EducationBrowse more blogs by Expert Designers

Trung Le is a principal education designer at Cannon Design. Over the past two years he has helped lead an interdisciplinary group of designers and educators from the U.S., U.K., Canada, and Germany, to collaborate on a research project that resulted in the publication The Third Teacher: 79 Ways You Can Use Design to Transform Teaching & Learning. The term "the third teacher" is derived from Loris Malaguzzi, founder of the Reggio Emilia approach to learning and who wrote about the three teachers of children: adults, peers and the physical environment. Environment, said Malaguzzi, is "the third teacher."

I'm thrilled to say that I will be blogging all summer from the late-lit northern evenings of Montreal, where I will be hosted for two months by the Canadian Centre for Architecture as part of their Visiting Scholars program.

[Image: From the drawing instruments collection of the CCA, courtesy of the Canadian Centre for Architecture].

The CCA is an amazing institution, and I'm very excited to be there for the summer; for the most part, I will be writing about many of the items in their ambitious collection—films, models, photographs, manuscripts, tools, and more—and publishing the results both here and on the CCA website.

There is a truly mind-boggling amount of things to explore up there, from the archives of Gordon Matta-Clark and Cedric Price, to a collection of antique drawing instruments and souvenir models, John Hejduk's Bovisa sketches, photographic plates from English India, Canadian fire insurance maps, speculative proposals for river lighthouses, massive archives of stage set designs and dramatic scenography, and a beautiful manuscript copy of the Plan of St. Petersburg, among far, far more than I could possibly mention in one post. Konstantin Melnikov. Aldo Rossi. Three airports by Frank Lloyd Wright. Travel sketches by Louis Kahn.

[Image: "Unknown photographer. Konstantin Melnikov (1890-1974) and his wife stand before their house" (1927); courtesy of the Canadian Centre for Architecture].

The overall idea is something that I've been calling "Bloggers in the Archive," a program that I am starting with myself as a guinea pig, but that I would love to bring to other institutions elsewhere in the future.

In other words, there are architectural and design archives all over the world, full of astonishing things, but these same collections are often unexplored in their entirety, even by members of the institutions that have collected them. Even more commonly, these collections are open only to scholars who stop by once every five or six years—if that often—to write niche monographs or academic publications about specific aspects of an archive's contents.

But what if you could install an architecture blogger—or a film blogger, a food blogger, an archaeology blogger, a fiction blogger—in an overlooked archive somewhere, anywhere in the world, and thus help to reveal those items to the general public?

[Image: From Scenes of the World to Come: European Architecture and the American Challenge, 1893-1960 at the CCA; courtesy of the Canadian Centre for Architecture].

Why not put Archidose up at the National Building Museum, for instance, or Frank Jacobs in the UN's Dag Hammarskjold Library, Enrique Ramirez at the Netherlands Architecture Institute, Colleen Morgan at the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, or even give Clastic Detritus a guest residency at the central archives of the USGS? Maud Newton, temporary blogger-in-residence at the British Library.

Call all of it part of "Bloggers in the Archives," and suddenly collections all over the world are being appreciated and seen by more than the five professors who have been deemed qualified enough to explore a specific phase in architecture, design, or landscape history. Put Tim Maly up at the Reuleaux Collection of Mechanisms and Machines for two weeks, or Bruce Sterling at the National Science Foundation.

After all, are academic essays the only textual form appropriate for archival exploration, or does the relatively ad hoc, point-and-shoot blog post, motivated less by scholarly expertise than by curiosity and personal enthusiasm, also have something valuable to offer? Somewhere between front-line archival reportage, historical research, and popular outreach.

[Image: "William Notman & Son, Building encased in ice after a fire, 65-83 Little St. James Street, Montreal" (1888); courtesy of the Canadian Centre for Architecture].

In any case, I also hope to find time this summer to explore the landscapes around Québec (including the megascale hydroelectric stations peppered throughout the province's subarctic forests, such as MANIC-5—leading me to wonder if Hydro-Québec has ever been the subject of a minor architectural retrospective, and, if not, if mammoth, Pruned, and BLDGBLOG could perhaps be hired to curate one...).

So stay tuned for regular posts beginning late next week from Montreal—and also watch for updates on the CCA's website (I'll have specific info on exactly where my posts for the CCA will appear soon). And, of course, huge thanks to the CCA for making this summer possible! I'm very much looking forward to it.

(If you, too, would like to apply for a Visiting Scholar position at the CCA, here is the application form).

WASHINGTON – Today, President Barack Obama announced his intent to nominate the following individuals to key administration posts:

Patrick S. Moon, Ambassador to Bosnia and Herzegovina, Department of State Christopher W. Murray, Ambassador to the Republic of the Congo, Department of State

President Obama also announced his intent to appoint Milford Wayne Donaldson to serve as Chair of the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation. His bio is below.

President Obama said, “It gives me great confidence that such dedicated and capable individuals have agreed to join my administration and serve the American people. I look forward to working with them in the coming months and years.”

President Obama announced his intent to nominate the following individuals to key administration posts:

Patrick S. Moon, Nominee for Ambassador to Bosnia and Herzegovina, Department of State
Patrick S. Moon is a career member of the Senior Foreign Service. He currently serves as Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary in the Bureau of South and Central Asian Affairs. He previously served as the Coordinator for Afghanistan while concurrently serving as the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Afghanistan. Moon was also the Deputy Chief of Mission at the U.S. Embassy in Croatia. His other overseas assignments include Beirut, Zaire, and Geneva. Other Washington assignments include the European and Eurasian Affairs Bureau’s Director of the Office of Austrian, German and Swiss Affairs, Deputy Director of the Office of UN Political Affairs, and Director of the Afghanistan Office in the Bureau of South and Central Asian Affairs. Moon earned an M.A. degree in International Relations at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University.

Christopher W. Murray, Nominee for Ambassador to the Republic of the Congo, Department of State
Christopher W. Murray is a career member of the Senior Foreign Service.  He currently serves as Deputy Chief of Mission at the U.S. Mission to the European Union in Brussels.  He previously served as Deputy Chief of Mission at the U.S. Embassies in Lebanon and in Algeria.   His other overseas assignments include Syria, a prior posting in Brussels, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Jamaica.  At the State Department in Washington he has served in the Bureaus of Nonproliferation, European Affairs, International Organizations, and African Affairs.   Murray received a B.A in Government from Lawrence University and a J.D. from Cornell Law School.

President Obama also announced his intent to appoint the following individual to a key administration post:

Milford Wayne Donaldson, Appointee for Chair, Advisory Council on Historic Preservation
Milford Wayne Donaldson currently serves as the State Historic Preservation Officer (SHPO) for the state of California. The SHPO serves as chief administrative officer of the Office of Historic Preservation in Sacramento and as Executive Secretary of the State Historical Resources Commission. Prior to his appointment as SHPO, Mr. Donaldson served as president of the award winning firm ‘Architect Milford Wayne Donaldson, FAIA’ since 1978, specializing in historic preservation services.  He is licensed to practice architecture in California, Nevada and Arizona and holds a certified license from the National Council of Architectural Registration Boards.  Mr. Donaldson is affiliated with several historical and preservation organizations and is a past president of the California Preservation Foundation and past chair of the State Historical Building Safety Board, the State Historical Resources Commission, and the Historic State Capitol Commission. He holds a B.A. and a B.S. in Engineering from California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo. Mr. Donaldson received a Master of Science in Architecture from University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, Scotland, and a Master of Arts in Public History and Teaching from University of San Diego.

April 16 marked the arrival of TEDx in Sacramento, bringing a “TED-like experience” to our area.

What is TED? TED stands for “Technology, Education, Design.” It is a small nonprofit organization devoted to “Ideas Worth Spreading.” Started in 1984, its purpose has spread to include an annual U.S. conference in Long Beach as well as a TEDGlobal conference in the United Kingdom, a TEDTalks online video site, an annual TED Prize, a nationwide local program called TEDx and more.

Per TEDx Sacramento, “The TEDx Conference provided a license and general guidance for the TEDx program, but individual TEDx events are self-organized.”

Brandon Weber, TEDx Sacramento curator, said the local team wanted to create a special event to “lay the foundation for a strong TEDx presence in Sacramento…to contribute to the dialogue of ideas and encourage creativity, innovation and action in our beloved city.”

The event was held at the Hinde Auditorium at California State University, Sacramento, to a packed house of several hundred registrants, and the program was recorded for subsequent online viewing.

Weber started the program by saying TEDsters are in a class of their own, that TED conferences are a mix of things and that we would be watching live video from other TEDx conferences in addition to live multimedia presentations.

The first presentation was a video called “Derek Sivers: Weird, or just different?” The focus of the video was that sometimes we have to go to the other side of the world to realize assumptions that we didn’t realize we had. Whatever brilliant ideas you have – the opposite may also be true. An example was shown of how addresses are determined in the United States versus in Japan. U.S. blocks don’t have names, streets have names. In Japan, blocks have names and the streets are the unnamed places between the blocks. Street numbers are based on when the homes were built.

Next was a live presentation titled “David Mogavero: An American Frontier.” Mogavero is senior principal at Mogavero Notestine Associates, with special expertise in the areas of ecological building, environmental planning, infill development, urban design and energy-efficient design.

Mogavero said the suburbs are a unique American institution, generating vast amounts of appreciation and scorn. Suburbs are the most inefficient form of human habitation ever done on earth, and an important place for focusing on environmental change in America, he said.
He started his practice by doing passively heated homes for people moving back to the land, mostly hippies. He realized that if he was going to be an ecoarchitect he had to work in the fabric of the community. He has done infill work in Sacramento and throughout Northern California.

The quantity of issues relative to urban sprawl are immense. People are moving back to urban America in large quantities, mostly in central cities. This has both limitations and opportunities for capturing infill growth.

In Sacramento, we build on average about 10,000 homes per year. Sacramento can only handle 19,000 new units – about two years of growth. The opportunity is tens of thousand of acres of underutilized areas such as parking lots, vacant housing and shopping center spaces, which can be eliminated for hundreds of thousands of houses and apartments.

When you have to design in these kinds of situations, you take the perspective of “do no harm.” You’re trying to instill more density but have an industrial complex that causes you to be creative. As an example, there is a commercial district in Yuba City – an opportunity to put people in a place with a services available now.

For Mogavero this is like jazz, which emerged from a convergence of cultures. Architectural development design is fascinating and fun for him for reasons like this: With a 10- or 15-acre site in the suburbs, you can integrate food into the project through agriculture. A community can be involved in the growing of food. There is also an opportunity for technology, which is more challenging in the city. Holistic integrated systems flowing back and forth continuously are possible in such areas. This is one of the most exciting venues in American building culture.

Next shown was a video titled “David Gallo: Underwater Astonishments.” Diving into the deep sea is a dark black world. We’ve only explored about 3 percent of the oceans. We don’t know much about this planet at all.

We are learning lots from the shallow water, which is full of predators that can change color & texture to match surroundings, but the deeper water still leaves much to be explored.

The Gallo Video proved a good precursor to Sacramento guitarist Ross Hammond, who received the Best Area Jazz Musician award for 2008 and 2009 from “Sacramento News and Review.” Hammond gave a spirited performance that integrated sound system issues that would affect the evening’s musical interludes.

The music was followed by another video, this one titled “Kirk Citron: And Now, the Real News.” The top story of this year was the economy. What kind of stories might make a difference for the future?

Some include the invasion of the nanobees, China’s rising, food shortage, the age of discovery, an ant mega-colony taking over the world or self-directed robots making discoveries. With or without us, life will go on.

For Citron, the top story was that water was found on the moon. In the long run, some stories will be more important than others.

Next was a live presentation titled “Ron Vrialas: The Great Green City.” Vrialas is an architect who likes buildings. He is working on what he loves, which is trying to build a great green city. He comes from West Sacramento, a place that has failed to solve how housing and commercial roads should come together. He spent eight or nine years avoiding going to Sacramento. He learned some things along the way about what makes cities exciting and green. We have been out of sync building cities over the past number of years, he said.

Once there was a way – we knew how to build the Great Green City. We used to build communities commonly, but technology got us away from earlier ambition and we turned in another direction. Things were cut off from each other by highways. Simple basic community-oriented buildings were changed. Places to gather and take pride in your city became places like retail with parking lots.

In 50 or 60 years, we’ve lost the ability to build things like McClatchy High School. We couldn’t do now what was done then on six sheets. He showed a picture of a bicyclist who will hopefully survive the Freeport Bakery parking lot.

An urban memory – he tries to find ways to reintroduce these things into our environment. Streets need to be for people. Emptyness in a block is a bad thing. Menacing facades are an embarrassment.

Preserving the past is something Vrialas said he believes strongly in. We need to cherish historic landmarks, adapt for activity, create the unexpected (alleys in Sacramento can become a network of interest within our grid) and resist demolition. Underutilized places need to be identified. Single-use is not good – everything must be a mixed-use environment. Empty spaces need to be change to active places.

History forward – Vrialas said he believes we find the identity of our city in the past. Getting to know oneself is how you make something. San Francisco has its identity, as do Seattle, Berkeley, Boston, Portland and Paris – all of the best of an urban life put together. In Sacramento we have a real history to build upon.

He looks to buildings for stories. We’ve been building cities for thousands of years, but we’ve only been building in a suburban manner for past 60 years, and we’ve been getting it wrong. We don’t have to look for a technological fix. We can have the fix in the way we organize ourselves – an urban design ethic that is important for human civilization.

Next came a video titled “Dean Ornish: Your Genes Are Not Your Fate.” The video offered encouragement for a healthy lifestyle. When you eat better, exercise and love more, the benefits can be measured. Topics covered things to do to grow your blood cells and things to make it worse. You age less quickly when you change your lifestyle. Arteries become notably less clogged, you can stop breast cancer, change prostate growth and even change sexual potency.

You can change genes, turn on the good genes and turn off the disease-promoting genes. We all have genetic profiles, but our genes are not our fate. We can also change how our genes are expressed.

It was now time for another musical performance, this one from Autumn Sky, who said, “My name is Autumn Sky. Really.” She and her guitar ,which she has named Samuel Taylor, performed and sang whimsically.

Next, it was back to the green theme, with a video titled “Catherine Mohr: Building Green.” Mohr explores energy usage depending upon what she uses to wipe up a spill. Sometimes the things you least expect have the greatest effect.

Mohr wanted to know how to achieve a green lifestyle. The average house has 300 megawatts of embodied energy. Some ideas she explored were deconstruction of the house, putting in a rainwater catchment, alternative roofing and framing, if putting aluminum windows will double the energy use and others.

Following that, it was time for another live presentation, “Chris Schuring Recycles Carbon.” Schuring's company, Ternion Bio Industries Inc., grows algae in a controlled environment to reduce carbon.

Schuring asked, “Why do you do what you do? Why do we want to build better cities, to go green?” He said he believes it’s because we inherently want to do better in our lives, be smart and leave a better legacy. There is a sense of camaraderie, of community. It’s me and you in the solutions we come up with. He did it because he thought reducing greenhouse gases and carbon footprints would be great.
Lots of people don’t want to do these things. People won’t care about what you do until you care about why. If we come together as humans, we can bring communities together to effect change.

Schuring has a personal goal to help 100 entrepreneurs start businesses to effect change in the next 18 months.

Next came a very cute video titled “Rives: Mixed Emoticons.” Rives – star of the Bravo special, "Ironic Iconic America," told a typographical fairy tale that was short and bittersweet.

After this short bit of comic relief came another live presentation titled “Robyn Waxman: F.A.R.M.” Waxman is an award-winning designer, activist, farmer, educator and founding member of graphic communication program at Sacramento City College.

Waxman looked at design’s role in the last 10 years. Moving more into letting other people design for themselves as the role of the designer seems to be the direction the industry is headed. She produced a 56-page tabloid on how to make your own farm. Millenial farmers have built Farm Davis on eighth and K streets. They have donated more than 100 pounds of food, or half of their production. The other half they ate. The farm runs on a gift economy without a budget. The space is on a privately owned front yard.

A similar Sacramento farm is coming May 2010 at 13th and C streets in Alkali Flats.

Up next was another video, titled, “Julian Treasure: 4 Ways Sound Affects Us.” Treasure said he wants to transform our relationship with sound, which has become largely unconscious. There are four ways sound affects us:

Physiological – an affect on breathing, heart rate and brainwaves.

Psychological – musical has the greatest effect. Music and bird sounds are reassuring.

Cognitive – you have to choose what to listen to. We have limited bandwith to decide which sound to listen to. People are one third as productive in open rooms as private rooms.

Behaviorally – move away from unpleasant sounds and toward pleasant sounds.

Most retail sound is unpleasant, with retailers losing 30 percent of their business because the sound is so dreadful. Treasure's company has developed a SoundFlow to design soundscapes. Music is powerful. Every brand is making sounds right now. Several well-known brand jingles were used as examples. There are four golden rules for commercial sound:

Make it congruent

Make it appropriate

Make it valuable

Test it, and test it again

We can achieve sound living through good use of sound

Another video followed, titled, “Alan Siegl: Simplifying Legal Jargon.” It takes a blizzard of paperwork to get benefits or a business loan. Siegl has been simplifying things for 35 years. He didn’t see why we couldn’t have a simple one-page consumer credit agreement, so he created one.

He seeks to define terms in plain English. Plain English is about changing the content. An agreement for IBM was received very favorably by businesses. IRS letters are pretty unintelligible, and he proposed changes to the IRS.

We must make clarity, transparency and empathy national priorities. We should not do business with those using unintelligible provisions.

It was then time for another musical interlude, this time from Sacramento musician Julie Ann Bee, titled “Sea of Bees.” Bee’s first full-length album is about to be released by Davis-based Crossbill Records. She performed two songs.

The next live presentation was titled “Scott and Julie Brusaw: Solar Roadways”, and was presented by Scott, an electrical engineer with more than 20 years of experience who hails from northern Idaho. They have spent years working on the concept of a solar-powered roadway system.

The Brusaws spent a lot of time together 30 years ago. His favorite toy then was a slotcar. He thought, “What if we made real roads electric?”

They discussed how there is no easy solution to global warning and other issues, including that 65,000 children die each day because they can’t get clean drinking water.

Couldn’t you make electric roads out of solar panels? Could they make solar panels you can drive on?

They said they believe so. There are some problems, but they aren’t insurmountable. We can’t let snow build on it, so he put heating element on the surface. He put LEDs on there to light it up, a microprocessor so all panels can talk to each other even with cars traveling overhead. The system can even warn drivers of animals on the road.

Storm water spills right into a nearby body of water. What if we could route that to a filtration system and send it for reuse? We can put power cables on the shoulder instead of in the air. We can grind up recyclables to use.

Brusaw started a website, and Treehugger.com picked it up. He received an e-mail from Booz Allen Hamilton – one of the biggest consulting firms in the nation. They now have four sample panels in their lab.

Brusaw has received a research grant from the U.S. Department of Transportation and has built a 12-foot-by-12-foot prototype. He said panels could be used in playgrounds and parking lots. See more at solarroadways.com.  

Up next was another live presentation, “David Garibaldi: Paints with Passion and Purpose.” Garabaldi throws paint around and sweats profusely. He started about six and a half years ago. It was graffiti, and it was illegal. During his junior year of high school, he was introduced to animation. By senior year he wasn’t able to graduate on time. He was creating art out of the environments he was in.
Garabaldi called his show “Rhythm and Hue.” He created pop icon paintings on blank black canvas. Santana popped up behind him at halftime at a Golden State Warriors game.

In March 2005, he asked if his art could do more than entertain. Can it benefit and inspire others? He has been able to help raise $500,000 for charities and organizations through spending $200 and painting on stage. He changed why he was doing it.

Each of us has passion and purpose. We can be creative, charitable, profitable and grow algae. He said we all need to keep going to put bigger purpose behind our passion.

Finally, a video titled “Derek Sivers: How to start a movement,” was shown. The video made its point showing a group of young adults in action. A leader needs the guts to stand out and show everyone else how to follow. The first follower transforms a lone nut into a leader. Then comes a second follower. New followers emulate the other followers, not the leader. As more people join in, it’s less risky to join in. Eventually, all who don’t join in would be subject to ridicule.

Nurture your first few followers, he advised. Leadership is over-glorified. It was really the first follower who transformed the first nut into a leader. Have the courage to follow, and show others how to follow. TED is the perfect place to do that.

All in all, this was an extremely varied, educational and entertaining multimedia extravaganza. It was also announced that there are plans for another event in November, so stay tuned.

More information about TED can be found at ted.com, and more about TEDx Sacramento can be found at tedxsacramento.com.

Archinect: What is your relationship with architecture? What drew you to architecture, as a photographer? Amy Barkow: I was exposed to architecture from an early age because my brothers all worked construction throughout college, and eventually, three of them became successful in different aspects of the industry: architecture, general contracting and real estate development. However, it was my mother’s creative skills as a seamstress and weaver that led me to explore fine art as a career. I studied photography, video and sculpture at the Kansas City Institute of Art and Combined Media at Hunter College in New York City. In graduate school, I discovered German photographers Struth, Hofer and Ruff who were making art related to architectural photography; they followed the tradition of their professors Bernd and Hilla Becher who documented disappearing German industrial architecture. I was inspired by the creative potential of their approach. I became fascinated by how images of buildings can shape the way we understand them, specifically those we may have never visited. I was equally fascinated by images that outlive their subjects as with Kurt Schwitters’ Merzbau or where an image is all that ever existed of an influential building/project, like Mies’ plan for an Office Building for Friedrichstrasse or Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International. Describe how you work... who are your clients? AB: When possible, I like to visit a project prior to the shoot, review drawings/plans and discuss the design intent with the architect in order to figure out the final shot selection. Although I started working in film, I now work primarily in digital; I use a digital camera with fixed lenses that is almost always tethered to a computer. I follow the light, (if there is daylight) which typically dictates the order of my shots. On night shots or on shots where artificial lighting is preferable, I like to order my shots as one might wander through the building or installation. The majority of my clients are New York-based architects, interior designers, editors and publications. Living and working in New York City, I tend to get interior commissions. Nevertheless, I was recently commissioned by an art gallery to photograph colorful large-scale installations by the British artist Richard Woods at the Lever House and at a private residence in Woodstock, NY. I was also just commissioned by a large advertising firm to shoot a newly re-branded store for the world’s largest nutritional supplement company. I have also had the privilege to photograph my brother and sister-in-law’s stunning buildings in Europe and Asia. What is your goal when capturing buildings in photographs? AB: Getting the shots that my clients want is a priority, but ideally, my images would capture the experience of physically discovering a building for the first time. I understand that an image cannot replicate the genuine experience, so I try to distill that experience into a handful of images, not to document it necessarily, but to expose something in a building that might not be so readily apparent. Surprises can be powerful. What are your thoughts about including people in your photos? Is it important to photograph a building in use, or by itself? AB: I think both are good to have; people add an element of scale and also help reveal the building’s intended use. While shooting an office building alone in Seoul Korea, I had to set the timer on my camera and run into the shot. I had to run several times to get it right; it was hilarious. What are your favorite pieces of equipment? AB: This is a tough question. Photo equipment and technology change so rapidly it’s difficult to get attached to any one piece. That being said, my favorite pieces of equipment are those that have been given to me. My friend JB gave me his Bogen tripod head, and my former employer Paul Warchol gave me his Sinar F2, a pro light, stands and more. These are the pieces I’ll never get rid of. Do you work alone? AB: I work alone and I work with assistants depending on the scope, budget and complexity of the project. That being said, working alone can be rewarding as it allows for unexpected discoveries; some of my favorite shots happen when I’m alone on a shoot. Time and circumstance don’t always allow me the luxury of shooting alone, and in these instances, I am fortunate to be able to work with dedicated and talented assistants. How do you feel about seeing your photographs on blogs and websites? AB: I suppose that is the point; it would be a shame for my work and the work of my clients to sit on a hard drive. On the other hand, architectural photography is one of the lowest paid in the field of photography. Usage fees from publications are a way for architectural photographers to keep rates low for clients who don’t have big budgets. All of this seems to be changing with the current economic climate where there are fewer publications and of those many are less willing or able to pay for images. At the very least I ask that I am properly credited and where possible, provided a link to my website.

Technology has been a part of archaeology from the time it shifted from treasure hunting to academic profession, from using geography to plot a grid on a dig site, mechanics to pump out a flooded tomb, statistics to map demographic changes or now, using personal technology and global positioning software to identify the previously unknown.

The latter is what Professor Chris Fisher and his team from Colorado State University have done. They discovered a large, ancient urban center using rugged handheld computers and GPS.

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This thousand-year-old urban center stands, overgrown with scrub and soil, in the Lake Pátzcuaro Basin in the central Mexican state of Michoacán. Fisher's team used four Trimble Recon rugged handheld computers in conjunction with GeoXH and GeoXT GPS receivers, to do real-time, on-site mapping of over 1,300 architectural features, including hundreds of "house mounds," in just one acre of the site. They took 25 to 30 data points on each feature but were still able to complete the initial full-coverage mapping in a month.

"The technology accelerated our ability to get meaningful data," he said. "We were able to create an architectural typology of the site right away!"

The culture whose city it was is known as Purépecha Empire, or the Tarascan Empire. They controlled a great chunk of western Mexico with a fortified frontier. On the other side of that frontier? The much better known Aztec Empire. The technology allowed the near-immediate capture of a moment in time of the urbanization of a Purépecha center that lead up to, and enabled, empire.

The city runs to about five square kilometers and dates to A.D. 1000-1520.

"The Lake Pátzcuaro Basin was the geopolitical core of the empire with a dense population, centralized settlement systems, engineered environment and a socially stratified society," said Fisher, who is associate professor in CSU's Department of Anthropology.

Although the city was initially discovered during the 2010 season, Fisher is currently presenting his findings officially at the Society for American Archaeology meetings in St. Louis. His team will continue mapping the city this summer.

Fisher specializes in climate change archaeology, plotting changes in climate and the cultural adaptation that went with it, including identifying which strategies worked and which failed. A project studying this, Legacies of Resilience, is partially funded by the National Science Foundation.

"One of the great challenges for the 21st century will be creating solutions to link social and environmental change," said Fisher. "Archaeology is uniquely poised to make a significant contribution to this debate by helping to explain trajectories of socio-ecosystem evolution over long time periods."

When Fisher heads back on April 18, he intends to make greater use of Google SketchUp, a 3D modeling program. He already used it to make in-field sketches but this season his intent is to use it extensively to create a series of walkable sketches and a three-dimensional picture of the urban center and its agriculture.

The same technology we use in our daily lives is helping to make that contribution possible. I'm sorry. But exactly how cool is that?

Fessin' up time. I hooked Chris up with his computer system during the time I worked for its manufacturer. I did so because the project, climate change archaeology, was so cool I almost fainted when he told me about it.

Discuss

Malise Ruthven

Walking above the village of Mehrauli on Delhi’s southern perimeter, we pass a woman with a half-empty bottle of water—one of several we have already noticed since daybreak. Dressed immaculately in a brightly-colored sari, she emerges from behind a prickly bush on a tract of waste ground. If she were a man we might not have merited such discretion. India is about the only country in the world where you actually see human adults defecating. When traveling by road or rail you can be struck by the image of men squatting openly, impervious to the public gaze. The UN estimates that 600 million people—or 55 per cent of the Indian population—still defecate out of doors. The practice is clearly born of necessity in a crowded country where the development of public amenities has conspicuously failed to keep pace with economic and demographic growth.

Conspicuous defecation, however, is restricted to males. Female modesty—enjoined by Hinduism, Islam, and Sikhism alongside age-old patriarchal codes—dictates that women may relieve themselves only after dark, or in the most secluded reaches of the forest, a practice that exposes them to violence or even snake bites. The consequences for women’s health can be devastating. Women of the poorest classes notoriously suffer from a range of urinary and bowel disorders born of taboos about pollution and other social constraints applied to the most basic and banal of bodily functions.

My companion and I are looking for the walls of Lal Kot—the oldest of Delhi’s seven cities, dating from the 10th century, before the first Muslim invasion. The three-kilometer walls enclose a space that has been largely abandoned to jungle. The cladding of irregular quartzite blocks has been cut so accurately that no mortar was needed to hold them together. Set high on a ridge overlooking the present-day city, Lal Kot is a magnificent outpost of a forgotten civilization—a worthy precursor to the great Delhi Sultanate that flourished during the centuries of Islamic rule, as well as to its grandiose successor, New Delhi, designed by Edwin Lutyens and Herbert Baker barely two decades before Britain was forced to abandon its empire.

Lal Kot is far from the tourist trail. To reach it you have to cross a large rubbish dump, and negotiate the odiferous detritus—what used to be known as night soil—left by Mehrauli’s less favoured human residents. They sleep rough, in old tombs or in flimsy home-made shacks erected near the open sewers that intersect the area’s magnificent architectural monuments. In the absence of municipal services, refuse disposal is performed by long-haired pigs, which eat up every kind of organic matter, not excluding human and canine waste. (As Moses and Muhammad taught their followers, ham and bacon are best avoided in southern latitudes.)

The lack of sanitation is emblematic of India’s failure as an emerging economic giant to include most of its population in its achievements. India is now home to the fourth largest number of billionaires. According to Tim Sebastian, the former BBC journalist who chairs a forum in Doha, Qatar, for debate about social and political issues in the Middle East, some 60 million people in India—who make up the world’s most populous and most powerful middle class—now enjoy living standards higher than Britain and France. Yet the vast majority are excluded from India’s version of the American dream. As a former government minister Mani Shankar Ayar told Sebastian: “We have a tiny elite that is obsessed with itself. If democracy doesn’t deliver for the rest—we could be heading for violence. We’re seeing a failure to bring 900 million people inside the system of entitlements. Without entitlements, you pick up the gun.”

A third of the country’s districts are now facing rural insurgencies spearheaded by the Maoist Naxalites. Is it not just a matter of time before violence spreads to major conurbations such as Delhi, home to 20 million people, many of them living on less than a dollar a day?

A visit to one of Delhi’s poorest quarters provides a glimmer of hope. The Nizamuddin district takes its name from the shrine of a holy man— Shaikh Nizamuddin Auliya (1238-1325)—renowned for his religious inclusiveness, his commitment to the poor, his disdain for rulers, and a love of music and dance that set him apart from his more austere Muslim contemporaries. The shrine attracts visitors from all over the Islamic world, as well as non-Muslim devotees. It typifies the spiritual syncretism one finds in India, where the tombs of holy persons attract followers from all religions. Until recently this run-down area was crammed with rural migrants and pilgrims hoping to benefit spiritually from the Shaikh’s baraka (blessedness), or materially by taking odd-jobs serving other pilgrims.

With no serviceable toilets available for pilgrims, the ground beneath the pillars of the overhead metro railway that is now under construction (causing a huge disruption to Delhi’s burgeoning traffic) has become an open latrine, a magnet for flies and disease. Now the Aga Khan Foundation, in partnership with other NGOs and agencies, is rehabilitating the area in a major initiative with the municipal corporation of Delhi. Measures include the organized collection of refuse, the provision of public toilets managed by the community, where users are charged a small fee for cleaning and supervision, and the re-housing of squatters who had constructed precarious additions to the 14th-century baoli or stepwell—the water is reached by descending flights of steps—now being dredged and reconstituted using the latest radar technology.

The local government school in Nizamuddin has received a comprehensive make-over funded by the Aga Khan Foundation in collaboration with one of India’s oldest charities, the Sir Ratan Tata Trust. In addition to bright new classrooms, well-designed for children, a vital outcome of the project, the headmaster suggests, is the renovated toilet block with separate cubicles for girls and boys. In Delhi—as in rural Gujarat, where similar conditions prevail—school drop-out rates have been highest among girls. Purely cultural factors—such as the demands of mothers for domestic help—are partly responsible. But teachers and aid workers see the lack of toilets as the primary reason girls have not been attending school, since there is no private place where they can relieve themselves. A program for building school toilets in Gujarat I looked at several years ago has yielded not just improvements in family health and hygiene, but a marked increase in female school attendance. Fifteen of the girls who took part in the program—whereby the children themselves cleaned the toilets—were going on to higher education.

Since the introduction of the new toilets in the Nizamuddin school, female drop-out rates have declined dramatically: the ratio of girls to boys attending the school is now 55—45 percent. Living in London one takes the humble loo for granted. A fortnight in Delhi reveals its potential for kick-starting a social revolution.

[ April 7, 2010; 19:00 to 21:00. ] The Rice Design Alliance, The Rice School of Architecture, The Houston Architecture Foundation, and the American Institute of Architects-Houston presents the 2010 Sally Walsh Lecture Program: Luis Mansilla and Emilio Tuñón. Luis Mansilla and Emilio Tuñón are professors in the Architectural Design Department of the Architecture School of Madrid, and have been visiting professors at several [...]

by Orhan Ayyüce Ole Bouman and I have compiled this conversation over several weeks. Orhan Ayyüce- A scenario: Many will describe the architecture's crises as if it is a software issue. For example: closed loop arguments about CAD drawing vs. charcoal drawings, form generating tasteful philosophical theories vs. the talented social theories, educated vs. uneducated, placement vs. replacement, excitement vs. boredom, etc... The main issue is the growing obsolescence of ‘architecture’ as we know. Architecture no longer matches the current complexities of mass public, economics, politics, conflicts and power. It is increasingly complacent and heavily produced by upper class of the society, in the exaggerated sense of Ivy League schools, corporate paychecks and boutique offices. It is an expensive product that can only survive by following the money. In other words, architecture is not housing the large segment of everyday life on the ground. It is predictably occupied with spatially aristocratic, western and philosophical ways of feeding its own development. Architecture is the do-gooder positivist party and a mouthpiece who speaks for the conservative liberalism. The worst thing that could happen to architecture (as with any cultural endeavor) is that it would be too widely associated not with wealth, but with greed. It would then, for the majority of people, soon lose its legitimacy.Ole Bouman- From your different observations I will focus on the growing obsolescence of the well-known dialectics through which we have understood architecture for so long: functional use of generic software vs. subtle craftsmanship, self-referential philosophy vs. social theory, educated vs. dumb. Their obsolescence rapidly becomes clear. I could add: context vs object, figure vs ground, analogue vs digital, architecture vs plain building. They were useful distinctions as long as both sides were serving clear values within a legitimate system: artistry to match human ingenuity, and a social impulse to serve human needs. Civilization can not dispense of either of them. However, if the elite does not take on its social responsibilities, than the elite is not an elite. If you give yourself a bonus for failure, the end is always near. The worst thing that could happen to architecture (as with any cultural endeavor) is that it would be too widely associated not with wealth, but with greed. It would then, for the majority of people, soon lose its legitimacy. Greed is the obsession with wealth, so excessive it becomes obscene. Some architecture equally becomes obsessed with itself, which is not a good sign of health. People easily bash it by calling it architect’s architecture, or architecture as a collector’s item for vain clients. The second part of your question is more dangerous: I read it as hinting at the risk of do-gooderism as a socially accepted costume for the same obsession. It is easy to identify this fake moralism if you start to notice major shifts in peoples’ position within the discipline. If someone made their career with disengaged postmodern theory or the production of iconic buildings for instance- doing little to situate creativity towards the common good, then a shift towards social responsibility or housing for the poor needs some additional scrutiny with respect to honesty. But if architecture needs to recalibrate its mission and discourse, then all talent is needed, even if it wakes up late. OA- Even though most architecture is developed from functional programs of mechanical nature, traditional vocabulary and tone of its criticism often limited to sensory commentaries that demand so called cultural refinement and taste. For many, outside of that limited critique, architecture ceases to exist. OB- Yes, very often architecture is measured just on how its looks. It is tolerated for its ornamental value. To check its performativity is too complicated for that; for that you need knowledge. To gain knowledge you need time. And to spend so much time you need dedication. OA- What about the nature of popular architectural media? It is over decidedly consumer product friendly. The actual content of the featured story is hard to separate from adjacent advertisement page of the material manufacturer. In that way, it goes as far as feeding and, in the same time, contaminating the architectural practice. Architects do submit to the media. That submission is usually very ‘buzz’ like. What are your thoughts about architectural media, writing and the audience? What can be innovative in this area? OB- Architecture media are of all kinds. As long as they are facilitating a market, they tend to turn into a commodity. If the media are giving the answers to what has been done (info updates), on how it is done (technical stories) or who did it (celebrity press), the media will move between trade and human interest. This is not particularly destructive to architecture, but is not productive either. It is a derivative, a secondary economy of first hand production. It capitalizes on the perceived greatness of architecture without adding much to that. I have always been fond of the question that as a sign of curiosity leaves all other questions far behind: why. The greatness of architecture needs a culture of speculation, reflexivity, good story telling. Architecture can not thrive without the continued probing of its promise. The greatness of architecture needs a culture of speculation, reflexivity, good story telling. Architecture can not thrive without the continued probing of its promise.I myself have always tried to associate architecture to the world of ideas, to cultural analysis, to historical backgrounds, to psychological set ups, to technological revolutions, to social tendencies, to economical models. Currently, by publishing a book on Architecture of Consequence, I try to reconnect architecture to the burning issues of our time and give it back its tremendous relevance that large parts of society denies it. Architecture, the lucid organization of space, is the pinnacle of human inventivity. It deserves our best minds. OA- Speaking of the best minds.., let's say I am looking at the published photographs of a new project (science fictionally named Happiness (Saadiyat) Island... A post medieval ultra-hyper-culture-city, colonized by American and European art dealers. In this format, not so sustainable in a socio-economic and psychological sense, yet, Saadiyat Island is designed by leading architects with medals. Can you take Saadiyat Island and dissect it for us? What is it? Happiness Island is the perfect example of that this kind of urbanism, that starts with a story or an image, and seduces people and capital to be spent on it. An architecture not consolidating reality, but creating one.OB- It is easy to dissect it. More difficult to comprehend it. I just wrote a piece about it. It will be out this spring. It is not just about the island, but about the current practice of “urbanism by speech” to which it belongs. Happiness Island is the perfect example of that this kind of urbanism, that starts with a story or an image, and seduces people and capital to be spent on it. An architecture not consolidating reality, but creating one. For some it is a fake operation of epic proportions. I myself describe it as the ultimate social historical gamble. Something that may go terribly wrong, but also something that may rescue current prosperity from almost a certain collapse. We can not judge it from a general perspective of the discipline. We need to understand it from its regional perspective to which global players are lured in. OA- The Louvre and Guggenheim. The Museums, a biennale ‘palace’ and a performance art swoop, the speculative unilateral culture gentrification and marketing, I am now looking at the renderings of the gamblers... I guess this might be a question on the urban branding stamp and putting the city dweller in the mercy of falsely benevolent powerful few. Should these few people allowed to define and parcel culture in a metropolitan scale? OB- With gamble I do not mean sheer speculation of the Ponzi kind. I mean that at some historical moments urban decency is not enough to move forward. The extremely rapid urbanism in the Gulf for me is not the ultimate gentrification, but the only possible way to redeem that region from its geography. Apparently for whatever it takes. Do you understand what this means? This has never been done before in history. If this succeeds the results will be disastrous for the so called west. It will start to realize that with all its thirst for oil, it has funded its own new competitors on the world stage. But if it fails, the accumulated fossil wealth of millions of years will be wasted on a fata morgana in only a few decades. OA- A theoretical question on the meaning of architecture: Artists took it fairly bravely when it was said "painting is dead" in the past and were able to move on. What if somebody said "architecture is dead?" OB- Architecture as our capacity to perfect shelter is never dead as long as we have a body in need of it. Architecture as our capacity to organize space wisely is not dead as long as we do something with that body. But yes, architecture as the art of expressing ourselves in built form may be comatose for a while, since now higher stakes are to be met. Architecture has no successor. If architecture is dead, we are dead. It is indispensable.Architecture is much more resilient than other arts, because it serves all levels of Maslow’s pyramid. Much more than painting which in many ways, has been succeeded by new means of representation. Architecture has no successor. If architecture is dead, we are dead. It is indispensable. The issue is not dead or alive, but does it live up to the expectations of today. Is architecture challenging enough to attract our best minds? OA- Ordos, Mongolia. The blooming desert of the metrosexual horsemen’s 9000 square foot sex pads. Are these served as innovative solutions, or, as you described above, a greedy venture model? Majority people in architecture love it. It's buzz press. Ordos event was curated by leading architects. They even flew the contestants there with tape measures and digital cameras to see and record the site. It was like a TV reality show. Though, the Mongols themselves disappeared from their land. Can we call this architectural disconnect? Did you say architecture is in coma? OB- I didn’t say architecture is in coma. Architecture as a form of self expression might be, which is a specific interpretation of what the essential value of architecture can be, an interpretation on which architecture based its social respectability for such a long time. If we make this diagnosis, for many it could be very confrontational. But that doesn’t necessarily mean we are declaring architecture out of order altogether. On the contrary, we need architecture for more than self expression. Beyond extreme individualism, we have to rely on architecture more. To me, architecture, by definition, reflects the adventures of modernity. This will continue. What is happening at the moment is the detachment of modernity from what has been its driver for 500 years: individualism. It also is detaching itself from its arena for the last 500 years: geography. It is out of the question that architecture as the encounter between an individual architect and a place to build, will be left untouched by this paradigm shift. Of course you can understand examples like Dubai or Ordos as the last stages of a disciplinary solipsism and hubris. But what interests me is how they can be interpreted as examples of a modernity that has entirely lost its connection to geography. There is, of course, a more general motive that needs to be taken into account. Think of Knossos, Chartres, Versailles, Magnitogorsk. Despite a deep sense of responsibility to people’s needs, you can not deny humanity’s quest for grandeur. We cannot do without Icarus. The goal is not to get rid of Icarus, the goal is to have him fly in the right direction. OA- I quote from you: “Architecture of Consequence proves that any notion that architecture should be an “expression of its time,” or should do no more than express the vanity of its commissioners, pales into insignificance when compared to its tremendous potential for resolving urgent societal problems.” This kind of brings some of the things we so far talked about to a more focused area. Can you now talk about your recent book, Architecture of Consequence? Concerning the architecture discipline, are we in for, or ready for a game change? Is transition happening and how and where? Do you have some case studies? OB- Architecture of Consequence is about the transition architecture can make to move from image to performance. Of course we have seen this kind of shift before. Perhaps it is the key antagonism that energizes architecture in modern times. Form versus function - oh no, not again. However, this time the antagonism can not be resolved at the level of the building, by choosing to be a formalist rather than functionalist or vice versa. Or to focus on facade over groundplan etc. We already discussed how these oppositions have lost their appeal. The urgencies architecture needs to meet today are simply too big for that. And the time pressure to resolve those urgencies is simply too great to leave it to personal choice. This time it is not about a personal choice of attittude, it is about an existential choice for mankind. ... we are increasingly coming to realize that for far too long we have been privatizing the gains and socializing the losses, resulting in an intense crisis of the economic system. It has become common knowledge that humanity faces enormous challenges that, for many or for all, have become existential threats. 1) food chains are undermined, 2) public health is at risk, 3) energy is running out, 4) space to live is becoming cramped at many points, 5) the valuable time of our lives is slipping away, 6) social cohesion is in decline, and finally, 7) we are increasingly coming to realize that for far too long we have been privatizing the gains and socializing the losses, resulting in an intense crisis of the economic system. We can not deny these realities, nor avoiding coping with them. And we need all the help we can get. In meeting these challenges no creative discipline, creative individual, or creative country can remain passive. And architecture has an even a more direct role to play. Since all these issues have strong spatial implications, architecture has a special obligation to help resolve them. There is a whole set of strategies and techniques to think about, all based on a strong will to resolve rather than to express: Reuse materials, energy, old buildings; densify and merge different programs, build flexibly and allow time to exert its influence by incorporating maintenance in the design concept; incorporate the public domain in urban planning, scout for the unexpected building sites on water, under ground, on the roofs; make use of existing forces on the ground and capitalize on their energies, combine tasks that belong to different domains and design comprehensive solutions that unify them. There is an entirely new practice in the making. All these techniques do not come to the forefront when your building wants to say “I am a monument”. But they do when your motto is “we are an environment”. This the mindset of the shareware generation. To share space, time, services, materials, energy, public space and wealth. And hey, I’m not talking about socialism here - I’m talking about survival. OA- Thank you. If I may add, ‘survival’ as a concept is often understood as a bitter pill. It is made to translate as an inferior product. Maybe we re-assign its meaning into architecture as a design necessity, something better in practice, in its spatial manifestation and as better mental and physical health, improving the economic, social and design value of architecture, sort of like easy ‘ideology’ for architects, for everybody.
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Shangri La's living room looks out toward the Playhouse. A retractable window sinks below floor level to provide fresh air and an uninterrupted view.

HONOLULU – The Hawaiian Islands have long been considered a Shangri La for the world's weary seeking eternal life, or at least a reprieve from reality's slings and arrows.

Doris Duke – a sensual, blond, 6-foot-1 heiress once called "the richest little girl in the world" – decided to build her own personal Shangri La overlooking the Oahu coast near Diamond Head in 1936.

Duke's spectacular 5-acre estate was both a temple to Islamic art and a pleasure palace where she entertained movie stars and surfers, playboys and priests. Today it is open for small guided tours leaving from the Honolulu Academy of Arts, Wednesdays through Saturdays.

A woman of large appetites, Duke served as a war correspondent in Europe, performed belly dances, composed music, played jazz piano and sang with a black gospel choir.

She was passionate about art, philanthropy, philosophy, culture, spirituality and men, though few held her interest long.

Before she died at her Beverly Hills mansion in 1993, she created the Doris Duke Foundation for Islamic Art, now worth about $2 billion, to manage Shangri La and promote the understanding of Middle Eastern art and culture.

The 14,000-square-foot main house – a feast of ceramics, furniture, tiles and textiles from Iran, Morocco, Turkey, Syria, Egypt and more – is open to the public.

Duke wintered here in the multicolored, richly textured dwelling, entertaining in the Turkish Room and eating in the tented dining room.

Duke was attracted to the abstract quality of Islamic art, which combines a deep spirituality with "tremendous sensual and sensory appeal," said Shangri La executive director Deborah Pope in the pre-tour video.

"She was the architect, engineer, everything," said Violet Mimaki, the estate's manager from 1968 to 1986.

"She was the maestro … and the tune here was Islamic," added art installer Jason Ferreira.

Duke's famous boudoir and her guest house, called the Playhouse, are expected to be open in the future. The Playhouse hosted luminaries such Imelda Marcos after her exile from the Philippines and Elton John, who played Duke's baby grand piano.

The main house features a giant elevator window that retracts into the ground so the living room completely opens to the trade winds and a Diamond Head view. It encircles a courtyard embedded with Persian tiles.

A 75-foot swimming pool, water terraces, white marble steps, palm trees and a tropical garden connect the main house and the Playhouse.

Shangri La isn't quite Hearst Castle, though the views are nicer and Duke did buy some Moorish lamps from William Randolph Hearst when he was trying to stave off bankruptcy in 1941.

The intensely private Duke built her escape between 1936 and 1938, naming it after the mythical Shangri La, a secret paradise immortalized in the 1937 Frank Capra film "Lost Horizon."

She berthed her yacht in the waters just below Shangri La and often watched surfers from her bedroom and sun porch, where she practiced yoga. The leggy Duke was a great swimmer who became one of the first haole (non-Hawaiian) women to master surfing.

She learned to surf from the legendary Kahanamoku brothers – Duke, Sam, and David – and had a torrid affair with Duke, wrote her godson, Pony Duke, in his unauthorized biography "Too Rich."

One of her guests was Father Frank Stroud, a flirty Jesuit priest from Brooklyn N.Y., said Stroud's cousin, Minnie Schaeffer, as she toured the grounds.

Stroud and the other guests would bunk down in the Playhouse – designed to be a miniature version of Chihil Sutun, the 17th century royal pavilion in Isfahan, Iran.

"He'd go in the late 1950s for a month at a time," Schaeffer recalled. "He said it was very lavish, lots of parties, plenty of lobster. He was a big flirt and could drink anyone under the table."

Stroud was devoted to Father Anthony De Mello, a Jesuit priest from India who – like Duke – sought to bridge Eastern and Western spirituality.

On Nov. 22, 1912, Doris Duke was born into privilege in New York City as the only child of industrialist James Buchanan Duke of Durham, N.C., and his second wife.

Pan American World Airways file Doris Duke, dressed for a trip to her home in Hawaii in 1946.DAVID FRANZEN Doris Duke Foundation for Islamic Art The Turkish Room features inlaid marble floors and intricately carved wall fixtures.

Doris Duke's Shangri La incorporates architectural and artistic elements of Islamic culture.

From the main house at Shangri La, a series of water terraces and pools leads to the Playhouse, a richly decorated guest house.

MARCO MAGAGNINI Special to The Bee Doris Duke's Shangri La incorporates architectural and artistic elements of Islamic culture.MARCO MAGAGNINI Special to The Bee Visitors can imagine Doris Duke looking out from this balcony.

Chair Warren and members of the Panel, I am Vikram Pandit. I appreciate this opportunity to appear today as the Chief Executive Officer of Citigroup.

Citi today is fundamentally different from the company we inherited when I became CEO two years ago. The write downs Citi took during the financial crisis – together with concerns about the quality of some of our assets – led to questions about the Bank's financial condition. Now, as a result of the government's response to the crisis, our new team's focused strategy and the commitment of all our employees, I am pleased to say we are in a far different and much healthier position. Today, Citi is operating on a very strong foundation and is positioned to contribute to the economic recovery and generate sustained profitability for the benefit of all our stakeholders.

We have bolstered our financial strength, overhauled our risk management, reduced our risk exposures, defined a clear strategy and made Citi a more focused enterprise by returning to banking as the core of our business. As a result:

• We are now one of the best-capitalized banks in the world, with a Tier One Capital ratio of 11.7%, a Tier One Common ratio of 9.6% and loan loss reserves of $36 billion.
• Our leverage is 12 to 1, down from 18 to 1 when I became CEO.
• We have cut the size of our balance sheet by half a trillion dollars, or 21% from peak levels in the third quarter of 2007, and substantially reduced our exposure to risky assets.
• Our cash liquidity is strong at $193 billion, and we have reduced operating costs by more than $13 billion annually.

These achievements reflect the lessons we have learned from the financial crisis and acted upon at Citi, and I will expand further on these and other issues you have asked me to address in my testimony.

First, however, I want to thank our Government for providing Citi with TARP funds. For Citi, as for many other institutions, this investment built a bridge over the crisis to a sound footing on the other side, and it came from the American people. As the result of a successful public securities offering, in December 2009 we repaid $20 billion of the Government's TARP investment in Citi in consultation with our regulators and the Department of the Treasury. The Government has earned $3.0 billion in dividends and interest on its investment and asset-guarantee program for Citi. In addition, we have paid the Government $5.3 billion in premiums on the asset-guarantee program, which we exited without the Government incurring any losses or making any payments. American taxpayers still hold 27% of Citi’s common stock, and we look forward to helping them realize value on that investment. Citi owes a large debt of gratitude to American taxpayers.

The Lessons of the Last Five Years for the Financial System

Citi’s financial condition, like that of every other major financial services company, was dramatically affected in late 2007 and throughout 2008 by the collapse in the residential real estate market, which led to an unprecedented global credit crisis and the recession that followed. The errors, mistakes and business practices that precipitated these macroeconomic events have been much discussed: housing policies that led to increased subprime lending in the residential real estate market; an explosion in new subprime mortgage products premised on the assumption of stable and, indeed, ever-increasing residential real estate prices based on decades of precedent; the Federal Reserve’s policy of maintaining historically low interest rates in the post-9/11 period; the growth in demand for securitized and structured credit products by investors of all types in all sectors with widely varying risk appetites and abilities to absorb risk; the lack of transparency in certain financial markets, including derivatives markets; and a regulatory system that did not keep pace with the ever-increasing sophistication, complexity and interrelatedness of the financial markets, to name just a few.

The lessons we have learned from the many and complex causes of the financial crisis include the following:

• That the entire financial system can systematically underestimate risk – and that an entire system can show hubris;
• That diversification does not always work as anticipated because risk exposures can be more concentrated and correlations more closely intertwined than believed;
• That in general we allowed ourselves too much leverage – too many people borrowed too much.
• That regulation must encompass all of those who are significant players in the financial markets so that we have a level playing field;
• That we must enhance transparency and protections for the consumer; and
• That to wind down major financial institutions in times of stress, regulators must have the right tools.

Consistent with those lessons, Citi supports prudent and effective reform of the financial regulatory system. America – and our trading partners – need smart, common-sense government regulation to reduce the risk of more bank failures, mortgage foreclosures, lost GDP and taxpayer bailouts. Citi embraces effective, efficient and fair regulation as an essential element in continued economic stability. Such regulation should have three points of emphasis: financial institution reform, market structure reform and consumer market reform.

• With regard to financial institution reform, we at Citi believe that banks should operate as banks, focused completely on serving their clients. Our internal reforms have been totally consistent with these principles, and we have publicly endorsed the general direction of financial regulatory reform under consideration by Congress. A systemic regulator with an overall view of the financial system and the ability to impose enhanced capital requirements and other prudential regulation is critical. I also strongly support the creation of an effective resolution authority that can resolve large, complex institutions in an orderly way.
• Regarding market reform, we support regulations that promote transparency, particularly in the derivatives markets, with the use of standardization and clearinghouses. It is also important that regulation is coordinated globally and applied uniformly to all participants in the financial sector. We need a level playing field on which market participants can compete, subject to uniform standards that protect investors and the marketplace as a whole.
• With regard to consumer market reform, a key lesson of the financial crisis is that what starts as an issue that affects consumers can become an issue for the entire financial system. Recent experience reinforces the truism that what is best for consumers is also best for the financial system and the economy. I strongly believe that consumer protection can and should be strengthened at the federal regulatory level. While a number of architectural frameworks could work to strengthen consumer protection, I believe any consumer authority should be centered on five principles: There should be enhanced authority in place with a focused responsibility for the well-being of consumers; there should be uniform national standards that apply to all market participants who provide financial products to consumers and a level playing field, irrespective of the entity; there should be transparency in disclosure so that product disclosures are simple, readable, and understandable; there should be a link to the safety and soundness regulator; and issues of market structure and collective action should be examined by the consumer regulator.

While some reform measures could have a significant cost impact on our industry, Citi believes they are necessary. Carefully considered reforms agreed upon by Government, business and consumers would lead to a healthier, more stable system. We commit to work with the Administration, with Congress and within our industry toward this goal.

How Citi is Embracing the New Reality

Given Citi’s size and global reach, and its exposure to subprime-related asset classes, the systemic factors at the root of the financial crisis, and their confluence, combined to impact Citi’s financial performance dramatically.

In response, we have taken responsibility for putting our own house in order. As a result, Citi is now a smaller institution that is focused on being a bank – not a financial supermarket. We are building on our distinctiveness as a global bank where everything is ultimately centered on helping our clients and customers connect with the world and facilitating the flow of capital that we believe is a catalyst to a U.S. economic recovery through manufacturing, exports and trade. And, we have developed a culture of responsible finance, including through a different approach to risk management, asset liability management and risk return.

• • First, we have raised capital, sold businesses to generate additional capital and reduced assets. The actions we took in 2009 included exchanging certain preferred securities and trust preferred securities held by the U.S. Government, private investors and public investors for common stock and raising new capital from the public markets in December as part of our agreement to repay TARP. As a result of our actions, Citi’s capital ratios are among the strongest in the financial industry. At the end of 2009, our Tier 1 Common Capital was $104.5 billion, up almost $82 billion from the end of 2008. Our Tier 1 Capital ratio – a key measure of capital strength – was 11.7%, while our Tier 1 Common ratio was 9.6%, up from 2.3% a year earlier.
• Second, we have rebuilt our senior management team. In particular, we have focused on strengthening risk management through regular stress testing and scenario analyses. Our Chief Risk Officer has not only changed the way we look at risk but he has made sure that we have risk managers assigned to oversee businesses, regions, and important product areas. At the same time, our Board of Directors has installed seven new members, all of whom have significant experience in financial services, and our Board has established a separate Risk and Finance Committee, comprised entirely of independent directors, to focus on risk oversight issues. We have also structured our compensation programs to ensure they further incentivize performance that contributes to the long-term success of the company and do not encourage excessive risk taking.
• And third, we have returned to the basics of banking as the core of our business. The company is now reorganized as Citicorp – our core, client-driven business – and Citi Holdings – which contains businesses that are not core to Citi, as well as a special asset pool whose assets we are selling or managing down over time. In the past two years, we have sold more than 30 businesses that are not core to our strategy and we have scaled back proprietary trading substantially. Citicorp contains a global consumer bank, one of the largest institutional securities and banking businesses in the world and a unique transaction services business, all supported by a significant deposit base. We are positioned around all of the drivers of global growth, including emerging markets and increases in global trade and capital flows. We are targeting a balanced business mix in our core Citicorp businesses of one-third institutional, one-third consumer and one-third services. Citi Holdings contains businesses that are not core to our future, with assets in three segments – brokerage and asset management, local consumer lending and the special asset pool. These businesses are generally more asset-intensive or reliant on wholesale funding and product- rather than client-driven. We have aggressively and successfully reduced these assets, both through dispositions and run-offs, and our focus is to manage Holdings down, over time, in a manner that optimizes value. Overall, we reduced assets in Citi Holdings by $168 billion during 2009 and by $351 billion from the peak at the end of the first quarter of 2008.

Our revenues have also changed since 2007, driven by our reorganization. In 2009, Citicorp represented 76% of Citigroup’s adjusted revenues (excluding revenue marks and other large one-time items like the sale of Smith Barney or the TARP repayment), compared to 61% in 2007. Citi Holdings represents 29% of Citi’s total assets, compared to 41% at the beginning of 2008. The Transaction Services and Regional and Consumer Banking businesses represented 40% of Citigroup’s adjusted revenues in 2009, compared to 36% in 2007. As the assets in Citi Holdings continue to be divested or wound down, Citicorp’s revenue contribution will continue to increase. We believe that the increasing proportion of stable revenues from Citicorp will provide additional stability during future economic slowdowns.

As we move forward, we believe we have positioned our business to perform as well as possible through the credit cycle and to gain strength as the U.S. and global economies improve. Some credit fundamentals appear to be stabilizing, particularly internationally. It is still early days but on a managed basis, Citi had its second consecutive quarter of declining credit losses in the fourth quarter of 2009 and non-accrual loans declined slightly for the first time in this cycle. However, U.S. consumer credit remains an issue, particularly with respect to mortgages. Credit costs will likely remain a significant driver of Citi’s results in 2010, particularly in North America, where credit trends will be driven by broader macroeconomic factors as well as the impact of industry factors such as CARD Act implementation and the outcome of the Government’s Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP) and other loss mitigation efforts.

We are confident that the measures Citi has taken to strengthen its capital position, build our reserves and maintain ample liquidity will allow us mitigate the risks as we work through the cycle. Our allowance for loan losses at year-end was among the highest in the industry at $36 billion, or 6.1% of total loans, and our cash liquidity was $193 billion. Firm-wide deposits were $836 billion at December 31, 2009, up 8% from the prior year and $3 billion from the prior quarter. Citi currently anticipates issuing less than $15 billion of Citigroup-level long-term debt in 2010 (down from $85 billion in 2009) due to our current strong liquidity position and anticipated asset reductions within Citi Holdings. In addition, Citi has a smaller percentage of its assets in later cycle-sensitive asset classes such as adjustable rate mortgages (ARMs) and commercial real estate loans than any of the other major U.S. banks.

I believe that as economic growth begins to take hold, Citi and the financial sector are on course for a sustainable recovery. Citi will continue to focus on our core business of serving our clients, and on managing risk. We also intend to continue to support our nation’s economic recovery through responsible lending to consumers and small businesses, working with homeowners to modify their mortgages where appropriate, and lending to state and local governments, universities, and non-profits alongside our corporate clients.

• Since the start of the housing crisis in 2007, Citi has helped approximately 824,000 homeowners and their families in their effort to avoid potential foreclosure on mortgages totaling nearly $98 billion. In 2009 alone, Citi provided support for approximately 388,000 borrowers with mortgage loans totaling $58 billion, and we helped approximately 270,000 borrowers to refinance their primary mortgages. In the fourth quarter of 2009, Citi kept 15 families in their homes for every foreclosure. Total loss mitigation solutions in 2009 increased by 50 percent versus 2008, and Citi remains #1 in active HAMP modifications. As of January 31, 2010, CitiMortgage, Inc. had active trials or permanent modifications for 50 percent of its eligible mortgage borrowers under HAMP, the highest proportion of any of the major U.S. mortgage servicers in percentage terms.
• In the credit card area, Citi is working with approximately 1.6 million credit card customers to help them manage their card debt through a variety of programs. This number includes 490,000 card members who entered these programs in the fourth quarter of 2009.
• And, in 2009, we provided $439.8 billion of new credit in the U.S., including approximately $80.5 billion in new mortgages and $80.1 billion in new credit card lending. We have carefully tracked and accounted for our use of TARP capital, which we used specifically to support new lending to individuals, families, communities and businesses in the U.S. This week, we published our fifth quarterly TARP report providing transparency on how we have used TARP capital to help support new U.S. lending initiatives. Taxpayers have a right to know how their investment was put to use, and we were the only bank to publish regular reports on the use of TARP money.

Conclusion

Chair Warren and members of the panel, at Citi we are confident in the business strategy that I have outlined. In short, everything we have been doing is to ensure that Citi never again needs the assistance of the American taxpayer.

I also would like to take this opportunity to thank Citi’s 265,000 employees, who are among the best in the industry. They distinguish Citi in their service to our clients and are unstinting in their volunteer support for the communities where they live and work. They are the backbone of our organization and fundamental to our future success.

Thank you.

Join the conversation about this story »

See Also:

• Here's Why Bankers Love Chris Dodd's Financial Regulation Compromise
• Great News: Bank Regulation Would Only Cost $221 Billion
• Even Capitalist Pigs Should Love Bank Regulation

When I was growing up, we often visited my grandparents in Brooklyn in the summer, and my earliest memories of New York’s museums will forever be associated with some extraordinarily hot, muggy afternoons. I cannot pinpoint the summer when I first saw, or at least was first conscious of, the Picassos and Matisses at the Museum of Modern Art. And I’m uncertain when I first visited the Morgan Library. But just as I remember the sticky rides to and from Manhattan, I remember the sizzle of midtown as we walked over to the Modern, and how all that urban excitement became part of the reality of Picasso and Matisse. As for the Morgan Library, I remember how astonished I was by its baronial splendor, by the sense of precious things encased in walls of stone. Am I right in recalling that the two great Memlings hung in J. P. Morgan’s study? And that a visitor was kept behind velvet ropes, barely able to see those Flemish masterpieces? Maybe I’m a little confused about the particulars, but something of the heavily upholstered, robber baron luxury of the Morgan underscored my gathering sense of the remoteness and wonder of the Middle Ages. That may have been an odd sort of history lesson, but it was not necessarily a bad one.

I have found myself reliving those early impressions of New York’s museums after seeing The Art of the Steal, a new documentary about the Barnes Foundation in Merion, Pennsylvania. The movie tracks the battle between the men and women who wanted this astonishing collection of modern paintings to remain forever in its original home in suburban Philadelphia and those who have now been allowed by the courts to relocate the museum downtown, to the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, as part of what promoters hope will become a museum district. I am firmly in the camp that believes the Barnes should have stayed put. Advocates of the move downtown say that a slew of masterpieces by Seurat, Cézanne, Matisse, and Picasso will now be available to a larger public. True enough. But the four or five mile trip out to Merion—the sense of a pilgrimage to this place where the paintings were displayed alongside American antiques and who knows what else—served to emphasize the uncanny power of these canvases. The Cézannes in Merion felt tougher, stranger, more fiercely indomitable than the Cézannes in the Philadelphia Museum of Art—and although that may not be a logical distinction, I believe it was a distinction worth preserving. Could it be that something in the curmudgeonly independence of Dr. Albert Barnes—who made a fortune in pharmaceuticals, dedicated his life to educating America about the glories of modern art, and delighted in denying access to the likes of Meyer Schapiro and Alfred Barr, whom he regarded as pedants—helped to underscore the curmudgeonly independence of Cézanne? There was something more than a little bit crazy about the mismatch between the relatively modest setting of the Barnes and its outrageously rich collections, and somehow that mismatch returned us to the essential outrageousness of what Seurat, Cézanne, Matisse, and Picasso were doing. Dissonance is not a bad thing. When you stood beneath the great mural, The Dance, that Matisse painted for that very spot in Merion, Pennsylvania, you were reliving the modern adventure—you were exactly where Matisse wanted you to be.

The Pew Charitable Trusts, which aggressively supported the move into Philadelphia, is one of the main villains of The Art of the Steal, and I do not think the portrait of the foundation is inaccurate. But in arguing that the Pew has used its involvement with the Barnes to strengthen its own position in the not-for-profit world, the filmmakers may lose track of the larger philosophic difficulties that the Pew has with an organization as magnificently odd as the Barnes. Through its widely disseminated studies of American cultural life, the Pew has encouraged a normalization of the relationship between the public and the arts, an idea that everything can be reduced to poll numbers and statistics, to flow charts and pie graphs. While the intentions may in some cases be honorable, the mentality is profoundly destructive, because it equalizes all artistic experience, leading straight to the cookie cutter museum designs of the past few years. The Morgan Library I visited as a boy, that rock solid treasure house, has been ruined by Renzo Piano’s inane glass box of an entrance hall, which suggests a miniaturized version of the entrance to the new Museum of Modern Art. My heart sank not long ago, when I read that Piano had been hired to create a new entrance and galleries for the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. What on earth is wrong with the Gardner staying more or less as Mrs. Gardner conceived it a century ago? What is wrong with plunging straight from contemporary Boston into this hothouse version of a Venetian palace, this fin-de-siècle aesthete’s retreat, where the dark corners are a jumble of Asian and Italian objects, and one of Titian’s greatest paintings, The Rape of Europa, confounds the surrounding opulence with its emotional opulence?

Cultural consumption is more and more in danger of replacing cultural discrimination. Maybe that helps to explain the confoundingly misguided exhibition of Burgundian sculpture that has just opened at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, beginning a national tour. In the years around 1400, a group of sculptors working in Dijon under the impact of the great Claus Sluter created a group of eighty mourning figures, each some 16 inches high, for the tombs of Philip the Bold and his son, John the Fearless. Their faces half-hidden by cowls, their bodies bent and twisted in sorrow, this stream of grieving men wander through the shadowy miniaturized gothic arcades which run beneath the huge marble slabs bearing the effigies of Philip and his son John and John’s wife, Margaret of Bavaria. The mourning figures from the tomb of John the Fearless are now at the Metropolitan; but they are fully exposed, removed from their architectural setting. The Burgundian sculptural tradition that Sluter defined, with its uncanny interweaving of naturalist observation and religious intensity, is not so much sadly diminished by the presentation at the Metropolitan as it is obliterated, a radical development in European art reduced to a product making the rounds. I wish I hadn’t seen the Mourners at the Metropolitan. I would have preferred to remember an afternoon years ago at the museum in Dijon. And what of those who have not been to Dijon? And perhaps will never go? Have they not been done a service? The belief that we can experience everything is as absurd as the idea that we can experience nothing. It is the intensity of the experience that counts. There are masterworks in the world that I will never see, and I am not troubled by that thought. If I never get to Angkor Wat, and I doubt that I ever will, I do not expect Angkor Wat to come to me. It would have been better that fewer people saw Matisse’s Dance in the very room for which he painted it in Merion, Pennsylvania, than that more and more people see the painting in a replica of its original setting, reconstituted on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway. When everything is available, nothing is available. 

Jed Perl is the art critic for The New Republic.

Filed under: News, Interviews, Politics, President Obama, Race and Civil Rights, Health Care Debate

America's generosity is one of this country's many calling cards. We've seen it time and again after a major catastrophe in our own country or somewhere else around the globe. Appeals for money go out and the cash begins pouring in. It happened with the Indian Ocean tsunami, Hurricane Katrina, and most recently with the disastrous earthquake in Haiti. Americans have donated hundreds of millions of dollars to help the poorest country in the Western hemisphere rebuild from the rubble.

But is our generosity hampering us from addressing the root causes of why Haiti was so affected and so unprepared for the 7.0 earthquake that likely killed more than 230,000 people and left another 1 million homeless? Now that the intense focus on the island nation is starting to fade, The Rev. Dr. James A. Forbes Jr. thinks the answer is yes.

The first African American pastor to lead the historic Riverside Church in New York City and the founder and president of the Healing of the Nations Foundation, Forbes, in his new book Whose Gospel?: A Concise Guide to Progressive Protestantism, makes the argument that the world should be focused on ending the economic disparities that allow a country like Haiti to reach such high levels of poverty and disarray. It is easy for us to give money in times of crisis while continuing to allow larger suffering because this country has become mired in individualism, secularism, and the race for wealth at seemingly all costs.

Forbes sat down with Aol Black Voices' Jeff Mays to discuss America's moral obligations to Haiti and other poor nations, how the Gospel is often manipulated to benefit those in power, how we can began to free ourselves from the prison of greed and selfishness and why people are the real assets of this world, not wealth.

BV: I read that Americans may have donated more than $900 million to Haiti after the earthquake. Can America's generosity sometimes be a bad thing?

Dr. Forbes: My thinking is in the normal understanding people view charity as a primary resource. It's a supplemental resource. We get riled up after tsunami or earthquake, but when that is over we go back to our normal pattern of looking out for ourselves. There are times when we all need a helping hand but charity given in midst of crisis is never a substitute for systems of care. We can pass the hat and put in a nickel or dime but for most people, the infrastructure of their society is their greatest benefactor.



BV: Why are countries unwilling to address the historical wrongs that have leaded to the awful situation in places such as Haiti.

Dr. Forbes: There has been an evolution into radical individualism. You should graduate from response to care for the community, and you can't care for yourself alone. There is a very powerful saying from Ghana which says: 'I am because we are.' In Ghana, it is considered necessary to be your brothers and sisters keeper. In a consumerist society ruled by the idea of rugged individualism and materialistic grasping, we find it allows human instinct to ease to the point where it's not seen as inhumane not to respond.

BV: If so many Americans count themselves as Christians, why is there such opposition to things such as health care reform or helping people in foreclosure that seem based on Christian tenets?

Dr. Forbes: When people use religious sentiment to violate their own interests there's something abusive and evil about that use of religion. My book Whose Gospel? is designed to help people think through issues that have to do with these so called wedge issues: sex, gender, race, war, economic justice and the environment. There's great controversy in religious circles about these issues. If I share with people why I believe what I believe it may help them identify why they believe what they believe. If that happens we are making progress because people who understand their fundamental values are not as easily manipulated by the interests and propaganda of other people.

BV: What role do the media play in these attitudes?

Dr. Forbes: The modern culture, with the proliferation of electronic games and gadgets and people spending countless hours looking at television, has reduced dialogue and thoughtfulness. Even going to church or Sunday school where people talked about issues from the Biblical perspectives represented in their churches has decreased dramatically. We are in the advanced stages of secularization and that means God as a liberator and God as a comforter of the poor has been pushed to the corners of our consciousness and the all-mighty dollar reigns supreme. It has not always been that way.

People have always had to decide between their temporal necessities and spiritual values, but clearly we are out of balance. We are in a materialistic world where people think the dollar has more to do with their well-being than their relationship to God who calls us to care for each other in community and who calls for us to practice the golden rules of loving ourselves, loving our neighbors and loving our gods. Those values have been eclipsed by prevailing anxiety about money and material things. We need the temporal necessities, if we are without them we are out of balance, But even if you are a billionaire and you have no sense of your own purpose and meaning beyond your billions and no sense of commitment to the community and the common good, no sense of hope in this life and beyond, in some sense you are spiritual pauper.

Too much money messes you up and gets you out of balance. Too little money messes you up and gets you out of balance. What we need to do is to come to a better balance; reduce the large gap between the haves and have not's; reduce the privileges that come with racial identification; the contempt we have of people of different races and religions. We've got to come into balance. My book Whose Gospel? is trying to help people think, pray and work them way toward a better balance. Even though we are one of the richest nations on earth our healthcare system is not the best.Our infant mortality rate is higher than many countries. We are taking more pills and we have more violence more rape and more incarceration than other countries. How in the world, if we are the greatest nation on earth, do we have the greatest instance of social dysfunctionality?BV: What does the election of Barack Obama say about these issues you are talking about? Some think his election makes us post-racial, but he has been attacked for trying to reform the health care system and impose modest reforms on financial institutions. According to Republicans he's trying to turn us into a socialist nation and liberals think he's a sell out.

Dr. Forbes: The image that comes to mind is when people have an operation for cancer and they remove a tumor. The big question people ask is did they get it all? In regards to racism, the mere election of an African American as the head of this nation is an operation on some of the cancer of racism. But I suspect that the things we are observing these days, not that he is criticized, but the tone and the intensity and the surprising sources from where the assault is coming, makes me think the racism has spread to the lymph nodes and although the tumor was removed, the carcinogenic source is alive and well in crevices and corners of the consciousness of our people.

When Barack Obama said it is important for those who have health care to consider spreading some of our resources around so that others may share as well, that was his Achilles heel. When he starts talking about a more equitable distribution of resources, some view that as an assault against their free enterprise system and their guarantee of sustained wealth for themselves. Obama's economic vision as well as his race may have occasioned the intensity of negative response we are observing.

There are also aspects of imperfection in every president so I would not say it is all because of race and economic disparity. Maybe his team has not approached everything appropriately, maybe it's because he is talking about change but some of the cabinet members are a reflection of what has been. On balance, when the cancer of racism is about, the cancer of greed is operating. That's why we are seeing strange things even from liberals. Look at Massachusetts. I wonder if there is such a thing as 'liberal light.' That is the ideology and rhetoric of liberalism but your heart is still tethered to selfish pride, greed, race and other prerogatives.

People need to understand that you can say to a person: 'Lift yourself up.' You can say to an addict: 'Stop sniffing that stuff.' But he is addicted to that situation and without help beyond himself he may not be able to extradite himself. People are told to lift themselves by their bootstraps but as Dr. King said, they don't have boots. The credit rating of someone who can't pay their bills is so low that when they reach out to get a loan its at triple the interest. Someone incarcerated because they were stealing to feed their kids, they pay their time and can't neither get a job nor vote when they come out. Jesus went around helping the poor because he said they that are whole have no need of a physician. He meant the people who think they are alright let them go but everybody knows at the heart of religion is to care for the widows and the orphans. Remember to read Matthew 25. It says: "When you did it to the least of these you did it also unto Me." People must understand their attitude towards the poor and their insensitivity is an affront to God. God so identifies with the poor that your place in heaven will be based on how you treated the least of these.

BV: How can we begin to correct the individualism and greed that has affected our country?

Dr. Forbes: The religious community has the burden to remind the culture of the necessity to be together in support of one another. People should be able to pay tithes and offerings with the mission that the outlay of cash to needy situations will be enriched. That's inside the church. Outside the church, we need to look at fair tax reform. The tax system is currently organized primarily around the interests of the powerful and the rich. This is why it's a problem when presidents give tax breaks to the rich and leave social programs underfunded.

Until this nation reviews the fundamentals of our tax policy and there is a balance in the way we tax and distribute resources, there will be a real problem. Corporations now are transnational. There was a time when they felt corporate social responsibility. Now, communities are no longer identified with one group of people. We have to introduce, in an age of globalization, where multinational companies also contribute to the well being and development of their nation and nations of developing world. Beyond that, people need to stop quarantining themselves behind their gates so they don't know other people. Education ought to include diversity in the classroom. Students should engage people of different social classes so that they will not lose the sense that we are all human beings in this together and that on a sustained basis we can be helpful to one another in situations where we are in need.

BV: If you were tasked with leading a group to help Haiti not only recover from this tragedy but develop a sustainable and functioning society, what steps would you take?

Dr. Forbes: Whenever I'm trying to look at curing a situation I have to look at the cause. Nations in the Western hemisphere, the European Union, International Monetary Fund and the World Health Organization must engage in an open and candid conversation about what accounts for the continued impoverishment of Haiti since 1804. What policies, geographic factors, policy interventions and criminalities, inside and outside the country are at fault. If I have a runny nose, what caused it? If it was caused by a diphtheria that's one thing. If it was a bad cold, that's another. What has been the history of our oppression?

Archbishop Romero never called people poor; he said: "Those who were made poor." Who participated in the radical denuding of the forest and undermining of the infrastructure? I know Baby Doc and Papa Doc but who else participated? We need to decide what the contemporary humanitarian vision for Haiti is. How can we envision a strong Haiti?

It seems to me that decisions were made in high places that we will not allow Haiti to be strong. It's no accident and not just earthquakes and hurricanes. Someone decided that a strong Haiti is a threat to the well being of the neighbors in the hemisphere. We want an international team to be responsible for looking at the rehabilitation and restoration of this society. We need to look at their infrastructure because the absence of infrastructure has made it difficult for those who wanted to offer help. We need a multinational team to envision how the showcase of contemporary humanitarianism can be manifested in the rebuilding of Haiti. We need to show that the rest of us are civilized.

At the same time, after the glitter is gone and the helping groups have returned home, we need a sustained Marshall plan for Haiti's for survival while we do the study of architectural design, demographics, agronomy and explore what the resources are. We have got to keep the people alive. Some have to be kept alive in Haiti but some must receive the hospitality of other countries. It is a hospitality that says if a disaster would happen to us we would expect our neighbors to function in the manner we are functioning with respect to Haiti

 

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Source: New York Times (2-25-10)

So in 1991, when during construction of a General Services Administration office building in Lower Manhattan, graves were discovered 24 feet below ground, and when those remains led to the discovery of hundreds of other bodies in the same area, and when it was determined that these were black New Yorkers interred in what a 1755 map calls the “Negros Burial Ground,” the earth seemed to shake from more than just machinery. The evidence created a conceptual quake, transforming how New York history is understood and how black New Yorkers connect to their past.

That is a reason why Saturday’s opening of the African Burial Ground Visitor Center, near where these remains were reinterred, is so important. Among the scars left by the heritage of slavery, one of the greatest is an absence: where are the memorials, cemeteries, architectural structures or sturdy sanctuaries that typically provide the ground for a people’s memory?

The discovery of this cemetery some two centuries after it was last used provided just such a foundation, disclosing not just a few beads, pins and buttons, but offering the first large-scale traces of black American experience in this region. Here, underneath today’s commercial bustle, are tracts of land that for more than a century were relegated to the burial of the city’s slaves and free blacks.

In all 419 bodies were discovered — giving a clue to how many others still lie under the foundations of Lower Manhattan. (Estimates have ranged from 10,000 to 20,000.)

Read More...

You’ll find us where self-expression comes to life.

With a community of 6.5 million users, and over 11 million unique visits each month, CafePress is where folks from all walks of life gather online to create, sell and buy "print on-demand" products that fit their unique personality.

Each design speaks to what people are most passionate about. It may be fan designed merchandise (from pop-culture phenomenon's such as LOST, American Idol and The Twilight Saga), a political cause, an obsessive hobby, a funny (or flirty) thought, whatever...

Join in on the fun.

We’re looking for talented people who fit our one-of-a-kind corporate personality (enthusiastic, industrious, and maybe a wee-bit quirky.)

CafePress is headquartered in San Mateo, California with our production facility located in Louisville, Kentucky. Check out our Life at CafePress page to learn more.  

Senior ETL/Data Architect


CafePress’ Analytics and Data Warehouse Delivery organization is seeking an energetic and highly experienced data warehouse ETL/Data Architect to work on various projects/systems. This ETL/Data Architect will be involved in work to develop a world class enterprise data warehouse platform for a company experiencing exceptional growth.

Specific responsibilities include:

•Lead and participate in the development of the architecture, methodologies, and standards for all BI projects by working very closely with the business and finance operations team to design/develop data warehousing applications.

•Technical design work, including data modeling, ETL design and reporting interface design.

•Development and implementation of technical designs.

•Driving testing and deployment processes.

•Stay up to date on core CafePress data warehouse design/architecture in order to understand impacts to data marts and data warehouse applications.

•Identify and diagnose data quality issues impacting the data ware house applications.

•Proactively identify opportunities to improve the quality, scalability or usability of data warehouse applications.

•Some on-call/support work may be required.


Job Requirements:

•Have five or more years experience using Informatica as the primary ETL tool in a mid- to high-volume data warehouse setting, including development against web services.

•Have extensive experience with data quality and various methods to ensure data quality, and with various kinds of source data, including weblogs, ecommerce data and data management of third-party/external sources.

•Extensive experience with reporting and business intelligence in an ecommerce environment.

•Experience with various architectural and methodological approaches in BI infrastructure development, including star-schema modelling, ODS development, conceptual and logical modeling, control table data management and rapid-iteration development. Preference will be given to someone who also has transactional database development experience.

• Some experience with Microsoft DTS and/or SSIS.

•Experience with a range of database brands but especially with SQL Server and Oracle.

•Some experience with an ERP system such as SAP or Oracle is preferred.

•The position will fill a need in our Data Warehousing group for a high-performing thinker who can apply their experience with ETL creatively and quickly and help ensure the group creates the right foundations for corporate growth.

•Experience using Pentaho ETL (Kettle)
-Performance tuning for ETL process and experience working with large volumes of data
•Infomatica Administrative experience

•Exposure to BI tool like Mircrostrategy, Business Object and Tealeaf
For immediate consideration, please click here to apply today!

I am driving down an open, lag-free road at sunset, a cool wind whipping my hair.  It is a glorious evening to be exploring this pristine landscape of green lawns punctuated with palms.  It is hard to believe that in a very short while, this land will be teeming with builders competing to bring the Usonian vision of Frank Lloyd Wright to [second] life.

This weekend, the Frank Lloyd Wright Virtual Museum of Second Life is organizing the Usonian Ideals Build-Off, inviting some 24 builders, from novice to pro, to compete and “see who can create the most functional and appealing building within the parameters of the USONIAN ideals” promoted by Wright in his writing and architectural work.

The event comes at a very exciting time for the Museum, as it was just announced this week that they have signed an licensing agreement with the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation in RL.  Details on that excellent news can be found at: Frank Lloyd Wright in SL

USONIAN IDEALS

Wright coined the term Usonia as a new name for ‘the United States of North America’, and the Usonian style was to be a democratic ideal, a modernist building free of ornamentation, in harmony with the landscape.

These homes were to be economical and functional for the depression-era American and  not use more resource than was needed, points which still resonate with today’s designers interested in affordable and sustainable housing.

The Usonian style shaped the face of mid-twentieth century American architecture, and many Americans probably grew up in a Usonian-influenced home without even knowing it.  The principles of Usonian design that the builders should employ are those which Wright promoted as part of his functional, organic design philosophy:

• A three-zone open floor plan, often L-shaped around a garden terrace, and comprised of a living/dining room, workspace/utility core, and bedrooms
• A modular grid that emphasizes horizontal lines
• Inexpensive natural building materials: stone, brick, concrete, wood, glass
• Cantilevered roof with broad, sheltering eaves, frequently pierced with trellises
• Clerestory windows that expand interior space, frequently constructed from perforated wood screens or [...]

• Jennifer Aniston is on the cover of Architectural Digest following the 2½ year overhaul of her home. But even though the mag is not a tabloid, it emphasizes Aniston's single status:

"[The house] originally had his-and-hers baths, but Aniston has turned the 'his' into a spa bath with a soaking tub," the magazine reports. People compounds the damage with the headline: "Jennifer Aniston Remodels Home for the Single Life. As though Brazilian teak, a master bedroom with wool-and-silk shag carpet and a platform bed with are reserved for "singles." [People]

• Beyoncé will star in a 60-second Vizio commercial during the Super Bowl on Sunday; apparently she wil sing, dance and shimmy in a spot by Oscar-nominated cinematographer Wally Pfister. [Gatecrasher]
• As you may have seen in Tweet Beat, Lady Gaga got a tattoo for all of her Little Monsters. [Perez]
• Madonna was "dumped" by Jesus Luz because they had nothing in common, says a source. Commenter Jane from Penzance says: "He isn't that special however he has got what he wanted a career and she has had a bit of young man in her life. I could not live with her as her voice does my head in." [Daily Mail]
• What is wrong with people? Kanye West does not fly business class! Jeez. [Page Six]
• Simon Cowell has the flu, which means he couldn't participate in Britain's Got Talent auditions today. [Daily Mail]
• Randy Jackson, American Idol judge and executive producer of America' Best Dance Crew, is being accused of stealing the idea for a reality show about a dance crew. [TMZ]
• Fox Chief Exec Rupert Murdoch says there have been no "real negotiations" with Conan O'Brien. Sigh. [WSJ]
• Johnny Depp making a documentary about Keith Richards makes perfect sense. [Mirror]
• Are Ed Westwick and Jessica Szohr on the rocks? [Perez]
• Prince Harry saw that portrait of himself and Prince William and commented: "I don't know, I'm a little bit more ginger in there than I am in real life, I think, I don't know, and [William] got given more hair so, apart from that, it is what it is, but no its nice, it could have been worse."This paper is trying to make it into a ginger issue, reporting it as a "he thinks his locks were given too much of a red tint" story. Nice try. [Herald Sun]
• Rihanna will be in Australia doing promotion for three days and will spend Valentine's Day in Sydney. [News.com.au]
• Here's video of Mel Gibson calling a Chicago TV reporter an "asshole" on the air. Pot/kettle. [TMZ, WGN, Us Magazine]
• Dr. Conrad Murray is preparing to surrender in connection with the death of Michael Jackson; he met with his defense team yesterday. [TMZ]
• This report claims there is no public time table for charges to be filed against Dr. Conrad Murray. The doctor's lawyer says: "I haven't received any phone call from anybody asking for the doctor to surrender. If we get the call, we'll be happy to." [AP]
• According to this report, the DA's office has a criminal complaint ready and Dr. Conrad Murray should be charged this morning. [TMZ]
• Samantha is getting a new "boy toy' for Sex And The City Two: Manolos Take Manhattan and his name is Noah Mills and he's a model who'll be playing a "tough but gorgeous blue collar type." Pardon me whilst I yawn. [LA Times]
• Tom Ford on his Single Man star, Colin Firth: "Colin is a handsome man and I thought he might be even a little more handsome. There is a lot of nudity in the film, so, yes, he did work out." Colin says: "I worked my ass off just so I could get to the point where Tom might be able to like me." [Telegraph]
• In a video at the link, Lost's Josh Holloway and Evangeline Lilly talk about the end of the show. Lilly, who does not own a TV, says that Growing Pains was the last show finale she saw. "I cried my heart out," she says. "I was in love with Kirk Cameron." [WSJ]
• Brittany Murphy's husband, Simon Monjack, has called off the launch party for his new Brittany Murphy Foundation. Monjack had been reportedly soliciting $1,000 donations per person to attend. [TMZ]
• Jennifer Lopez's craptastic-looking movie The Back-Up Plan has been delayed. Never a good sign. [Deadline Hollywood]
• As you may have seen in Tweet Beat, Lily Allen has returned to Twitter after a four month break. [The Sun]
• Timbaland was in Las Vegas and tried to get someone to open the Louis Vuitton store for him even though it was closed, to no avail. "He had to wear a sweater from his suitcase for his show." [Page Six]
• "According to Faces of America, PBS's new documentary on genealogy, Meryl Streep, Yo-Yo Ma and Eva Longoria Parker are distantly related." [Page Six]
• Also according to Faces Of America: Uber-Catholic Stephen Colbert found out that his family descends from Lutherans."There were tears." [Gatecrasher]
• Ellen Pompeo showed off a picture of her new daughter, Stella Luna, on Ellen Degeneres' show yesterday. The baby was being held by her dad and they were both wearing gingham. Pompeo said of her husband: "Chris – he loves dressing her up like him. He goes out and buys her clothes that look like his clothes." Is there an infant tuxedo in that girl's future? [Access Hollywood]
• Mena Suvari: Getting married this summer. [Page Six]
• Jersey Shore star The Situation is trying to trademark "The Situation:" and wants to put "The Situation" on a variety of clothing items, including bathing suits, underpants, tennis wear and tracksuits. [MSNBC Scoop]
• You think you want to see Gerard Butler's butt, but you don't. [ONTD]
• Thank Athena someone straightened out whatever was going on with Michael Jackson's dead giraffes. It was just undignified. [TMZ]
• George Clooney's 1997 film Batman And Robin was named "the most disastrous film ever made." [Reuters]
• Whatshername got married in Vegas. [BBC News, Daily Mail]
• "What happened between Chris Brown and Rihanna was unacceptable, and we need to all work together and make sure it never happens again, to anyone." — Ne-Yo, who is donating proceeds from his new single, to Re spect!, a nonprofit devoted to ending violence in relation ships. [Page Six]
• "I remember thinking before we started shooting, 'OK, how does a thoughtful, smart woman who's trying to get her life on track, to be a good mom, how does she fall for a serious drunk?' And then you know what? I never thought about it again. I think that's how it happens." — Maggie Gyllenhaal, on Crazy Heart. [Rolling Stone]
• "I have raised my personal donation from $250,000 to $1 million. I did this realizing that after the next big story comes along, the news media will pack up and leave the people of Haiti to fend for themselves. They always do. So my plan is to do just what I did when I built those 20 houses for the survivors of Hurricane Katrina. Sometimes it's best to wait for the frenzy to pass to really be effective. Haiti needs help now and there are a lot of people doing that, but they will also need help in the coming months." — Tyler Perry. [ET]
• "She's incredible. I think she's the new 'it girl' in the industry. She has so much a swagger. I actually got to hang out with her at the NRJ Awards. It's really her life - that's just who she is, which is what I appreciate." — Rihanna, on Ke$ha. I know, I know. [Just Jared]