The Pocket Square

I wanted to post quickly to say that I’ll be in Washington DC next week for two events, one of which is listed above. I’m really excited to come back to the District and expect more to come on the other event, a walking tour of modern embassies. I hope to see you there.

Boomer and Helo outside of Moishe Safdie's main branch of the Vancouver Public Library in the "Bastille Day" episode of Battlestar Galactica.

Films and TV shows have long been shot in Vancouver for the financial savings, North American cityscapes and significant natural beauty it offers. So it was little surprise to see the city in the “Bastille Day” episode of Battlestar Galactica I watched last night. As the characters Helo and Boomer, marooned on a scorched interstellar colony called Caprica, now run by the robotic Cylons, made their way through the deserted city, they came upon one of the worst buildings the city has to offer: The Vancouver Public Library. I’ve had mixed feelings on architect Moshe Safdie for some time. His claim to fame, and still his best building, wowed me when I saw it a couple years ago on a Dwell trip to Montreal. His Habitat 67 is unlike anything else in the city, a tessellated mound of geometric modules piling up cheek by jowl that served as housing during Montreal’s 1967 World’s Fair. It’s still the architectural hallmark of the city, and the work that catapulted the 24 year old Safdie to the international stage.

Moshe Safdie's wonderful Habitat 67.

I saw other Safdie work while in Montreal, including an underwhelming department store that was little more than an exercise is aimless post-modernism: A tossed-off thing by an architect whose star was on the wane but still had plenty of brand recognition in the town that helped make his reputation.

So as I came to the Vancouver Public Library last summer I had a feeling that it would make or break my impression of the architect. Needless to say, I was underwhelmed. The blandness of a facade of beige concrete and high, opaque windows is only barely mitigated by the structure’s gentle nautilus curl. I appreciated the open-air arcade that allows one to pass through the structure while staying outdoors, but the high galleries inspired less awe than boredom. Enthralled with his homage to classical forms (one can’t help but think of a Greek amphitheater or the Coliseum) Safdie failed to say anything about the here and now. And considering what a milquetoast city Vancouver is architecturally, with slowly patinating copper condo towers dotting the skyline like stripped pine trees and elevated freeways marring the waterways, I held Safdie responsible for a severe lack of imagination. Not only does the library loom over a pedestrian mall, but it says little to the buildings around it, instead rising from its considerable plaza with an undue hauteur.

Why then did I like seeing it so much on Battlestar Galactica? I think it was because it managed to look at once futuristic and arcane. Like so much science fiction set in a galaxy far, far away, BSG manages to at once suggest the technologies and environments to come, while drawing heavily on antiquity for cultural touchstones (Caprica, Apollo, Thrace, Gemenon, Sagitarion, Cyranus and Agathon are the names in play), and human drama. Vancouver offers that well-scrubbed urbanity that we like to think the distant future holds, while still retaining styles and structures that many of us hope never to lose. Shot in heavy sepia tones, the lonely VPL, in its expanse of concrete, appears like a temple and a relic bereft of any recognizable iconography, an ancient form repurposed for advanced times. Though I’m not sure what he aims to do or say about present day Earth, Safdie, unbenownst to him, I’m sure, turns out to be the ideal architect for post-nuclear, Cylon-controlled Caprica. Though those commissions, one presumes, are far tougher to get.

The 15th St. NW entrance to the Washington Post building.

One of my favorite things about my two and half years of living in Washington DC was waking up every morning to the Post on my doorstep. It’s hard to imagine a finer paper, one that is as stellar a national and international journal yet still serves it’s community as well as the Post does. Sorry, New York Times, you’re a lousy local rag. So imagine my glee yesterday as I got a tour of the newsroom and chance to chat finally meet cultural critic Philip Kennicott, who has become something of a pal, in person. He toured me around the fourth and fifth floors before showing me his desk, where I met classical music critic Anne Midgette, whose forthcoming Post blog Classical Beat I await impatiently. The New York Times is lauded perpetually for its arts coverage, and though it’s often quite good, those who think the Post is just a vehicle for Tom Toles should really peruse the arts and culture writing.

As Philip and I wandered around the fifth floor, admiring a massive aerial photo of the city and stumbling across a large poster of Shirley Povich, longtime Post sportswriter and a cousin of mine by marriage, I even further lamented the fact that I no longer rise to the dulcet prose of Ghivan, Robinson, Applebaum and yes, dare I say it, bellicose old Krauthammer.

I’ve long been a Post devotee, but wandering around the offices and then chatting with Philip about music, the city and architecture in a nearby Caribou Coffee (a most Washingtonian of rituals) my love for not just the Post but for papers soared. Writing for the San Francisco Chronicle has been a delight and the prospect of my city without it is a deeply worrying thought. Any major city without a proper paper is a strike against it. Bad for the arts, bad for we citizens, bad for our democracy.

Dwell.com relaunched Thursday morning and is the best the site has ever been.

I’m very pleased to announce that at long last the redesigned and better-than-ever dwell.com is up and running! Our web team has been hard at it for months, and under the gimlet eyes of online editor Sarah Rich and others it’s looking quite wonderful. Previous iterations of the site have been tough to search and felt like imperfect resources for those interested in modern design. As all of our content migrates onto the site and the inevitable glitches get worked out, dwell.com will become the premiere site for modern architecture and design.

I’ve been blogging quite a bit as part of my daily duties as an editor. Here are a couple of late that I think came off pretty well: This one is about how giant ferris wheels look to be replacing the requisite Gehry building as the way to architecturally re-brand a city; another deals with how architecture functions in the rather poor film “The International;” still a third appreciates John Updike as an architecture critic. Keep checking back as the site is only bound to get better!

The apartment blocks in which much of Gomorrah takes place.

I saw the wonderful gangster film Gomorrah directed by Matteo Garrone yesterday, and was struck at the level of decay and desiccation presented. The film was set largely in Scampia, a suburb of Naples apparently riddled with the criminal activities of the Camorra crime organizations. It’s a fascinating portrait of how deeply the organization penetrates the lives of both average Scampians, Neapolitans and the thugs themselves, but it’s also a staggering use of architecture and landscape in filmmaking.

The literally crumbling apartment blocks, terraced half-ziggurats paying homage to nothing, tell only half the story of paranoia and a life without opportunity. An earthquake in the early 80s terribly damaged the region, and this film suggests that things, socially, culturally, politically and architecturally, have been left to slowly rot ever since.

Eyesores of post-war brutalism, the facades of these buildings tell only half the story. Within their concrete passageways, crevices and bombed-out hollows lie passageways, hiding places and caverns prime for lookouts, hidden caches of weapons and the kind of subterranean malfeasance that so often surfaces.

Still from Gomorrah of Gaetano being killed by rival gangsters.

Continuing on this theme of endemic, toxic rot, Gomorrah tells the story of Franco and Roberto, two more polished arms of the Camorra who launder money through large waste disposal contracts with European businesses (see this story from Reuters last year for more on how the Camorra do this). Acting with no fear of governmental oversight, they collect toxic waste and bury it in quarries, literally poisoning the very ground from which the buildings and their inhabitants spring.

It’s both a potent symbol and a very real demonstration of how the Camorra is so deeply entrenched with what impunity it operates. The end of the film says that cancer rates are up 20% in areas where the Camorra controls the waste management and than in the last 30 years they’ve killed one person every three days.

I’ve been reading Alain de Botton’s The Architecture of Happiness, which takes great strides and overweening prose to make the rather facile point that our spaces effect the way we feel, but this film is an exemplar of that notion. The film has an utterly hopeless, claustrophobic feel that wasn’t won through shaky, hand-held cameras or an unnerving score. Gomorrah is a portrait of a doomed landscape, one stripped of the built environment’s capacity to ennoble or inspire. This is squalor writ large, and if one accepts de Botton’s thesis, Scampia has managed to build, not build or disregard to the point of obsolescence, a society that strongly echoes its surroundings.

Marco and Ciro testing out stolen guns at a swampy beach in Gomorrah.

One does start to wonder though, on a massive infrastructural scale, what micro-societies will spring up in these wastelands, and how to combat them through opportunity, attention and design. Housing projects in tough parts of American cities are often pointed to as isolated, and some would suggest, fixable, examples of design that has lost its sense of humanity, but happens when whole cities, right down to their toxic groundwater, lose their sense of progress, momentum and morality?