parkettes

Department of Unusual Certainties. Parkettes, Toronto March 2010

Department of Unusual Certainties is a research group in Toronto which is holding a magazine launch for On Site 23: small things this Thursday evening at the Toronto Free Gallery.

Their connection to On Site came with this issue where they sent us part of their massive Parkette study.  Parkettes are very very tiny parks, left over pieces of ground really, strips of grass on a median, front yard setbacks to city buildings, scraps of ground between two roads too small to develop, which nonetheless have been named and are officially part of Toronto's park system. 

They speak to the ad hoc use of public space in an urban environment: the question for most cities is whether the City itself looks after it – one can think of all the petanque or boules boulevards throughout Europe – or whether such public space appears to be un-owned and therefore rubbish.

The distinction is going to be in the degree of civic responsibility felt by each citizen. Are these corners of park 'owned' by the citizens and respected as such, or, again, are they rubbish?  Will they be the site of a guerilla garden and left to flourish, or will the city parks department keep them as shaved grass, denoting the parkette's listing on the parks register?

We are a nation of front and back yards where our gardening attention is private and personal, where city parks are visual 'green space' with little use unless they contain a bunch of playground equipment.  The centrality of public parks in our civic daily lives rarely attains the centrality of Central Park, for example.  When almost everyone lives in apartments, people value parks, deeply.  The city is made beautiful when all its corners, its trees, its thin strips of grass, are loved. 

wild salmon

There is a disaster playing out in the Gulf of Mexico which will destroy fish and seafood stocks for generations.  There is an ongoing disaster playing out on our coasts, also destroying fish and seafood stocks for generations. 

I have to package up On Site 23: small things over the next few days so shall post this video for everone to watch: it is manifesto, ode to the coast, ode to our silver brothers in crisis, it is beautiful and necessary. 

The Migration Begins! - The "Get Out for Wild Salmon" Video from Twyla Roscovich on Vimeo.

The site that this comes from is salmonaresacred.org

chernobyl

Steve Chodoriwsky. Chernobyl, May 2010

Steve Chodoriwsky sent these two pictures of Chernobyl yesterday, from, as he puts it, a sunny and summery Kyiv.  Hard to believe that the Chernobyl nuclear meltdown happened almost 25 years ago, in 1986, before the Soviet Union disbanded.  The mid-1980s seemed to be when the USSR was at its darkest and most intransigent.  Chernenko had briefly succeeded the also brief Andropov after a long two decades of Brezhnev and in 1985 Gorbachev came to power.  And soon it was all over.
 
Chernobyl spread radioactive dust all over Europe affecting people, crops, livestock: the dawning that the environment does not actually have political borders in it.  Chernobyl itself was abandoned, although I've read several novels about a kind of feral life that goes on in the abandoned city.
  
No matter how hard-edged urban life is, this is what will happen within a single generation if we just let everything go.  All the stone, the concrete, the asphalt, solid as it seems, clearly needs much maintenance and attention: there is a symbiosis here in such architecture and infrastructure.  It needs us, while in our minds I sometimes wonder if we only think about how much we need it.  

Steve Chodoriwsky. Chernobyl, May 2010

love lies bleeding

Stuart Gordon, Calgary Herald. Love Lies Bleeding dress rehearsal, May 5 2010

Love Lies Bleeding, Alberta Ballet. Jean Gand-Maitre, choreographer.

Ballet lite this isn't.  It is dark, dark, dark, in the way that Berlin cabaret had its dark eroticism.  By comparison it is the old Frederick Ashton-type ballets, all romantic with tutus, that seem very light.  The themes of Elton John's life are large and powerful: identity, addiction, AIDS and celebrity: ubiquitous as these themes might seem, they are not normal little narratives.  They are disturbing and operatic.
The recorded soundtrack belts out at rock concert volumes; many of the cuts were live versions so there is additional crowd frenzy. As no doubt in John's life itself, there is no respite: scenes, songs, costumes and crises are relentless. There is a large video screen as backdrop commenting and contextualising, and sometimes amplifying, what is being danced below it.  

From the first step this ballet does not pretend, as ballet has for so long, to be about heterosexuality: it is overtly homoerotic.  Along with the classic entrechats and bourrées are several Tom of Finland moments; along with dancers on point there are just as many in stiletto boots; the outstandingly revealing but traditional tights and leotards of classical male dancers are sent over the top with huge striped codpieces worn by all, male and female.  Flesh glistens, buttocks are thonged, S & M clichés pound on, the audience popularity prize went to three dancers in drag.

Our wee hero, supposedly an Elton fan, but clearly Elton John as a fan of his own narrative, is mostly seen as small and nekkid, and who dresses up sometimes, but is always left on his own at the end of some dramatic event, coping alone.  or not coping.  The scale shift between the larger than life corps de ballet and this small person is exploited throughout: one gets the sense, that despite the sensational leaps and bounds of Yukichi Hattori (who was dancing the lead the night I saw this), there was an absolute vulnerability to the lead dancer, usually assigned to the prima ballerina in conventional ballets.  The two pas de deux between men were so much more moving, and sexual, than the gender and power imbalance in the traditional pas de deux where the male is the often wooden support and armature for the fluttering, tragic female heroine.

One can see that Love Lies Bleeding has the potential to develop audiences that turn out in star-shaped glasses, platform boots and feather boas in the way that fans who go to the Rocky Horror Picture Show and The Sound of Music do.  It is perhaps inevitable, but unfortunate.  Is part of John's celebrity, in this age of celebrity, that the public refuses to look past the costuming?  The rose-coloured glasses, the Liberace excess, the gay hilarity of performance: they are all in this ballet, but they sit on a bedrock of terrible personal confusion and loss, also all in this ballet.

issue 23 issue release party

Department of Unusual Certainties is holding an issue release party for On Site 23: small things at Toronto Free Gallery May 20th.

This party is sponsored by Sweeny Sterling Finlayson &Co Architects Inc and Steam Whistle Brewing — what generous champions!

The contributors to this issue from the Toronto area will give a short shout on the small things they wrote about, photographed, drew, thought about and submitted to On Site.

All welcome.

chanel povera

Tommy Ton. Jak & Jil, 1/05/2010from Jak & Jil this week.

material and conceptual sustainability

EMBT. Spanish Pavilion at Shanghai Expo 2010When the Shanghai Expo opened a few days ago, one of the tv news clips was shot in front of the Spanish pavilion designed by Benedetta Tagliabue of Miralles Tagliabue (EMBT).  Clearly very photogenic, its skin consists of thousands of grass, raffia, wicker and reed mats laid like loose shingles on a steel frame heaped up on the site like a pile of ribbon.  The mats were woven in Shandong Province; the pavilion has three exhibition rooms focussing on Spanish film makers.  It all seems conceptually and materially clear. 
Good series of photographs can be seen at designboom and dezeen. 

Might we spare a few moments of thought for the Canadian pavilion, a big steel frame 'C' covered in Canadian Western Red Cedar, cut in our forests and shipped from BC to China.  One can still see logging trucks on Vancouver Island carrying obviously old growth cedar 5 or 6' in diameter: it will be seen someday as criminal as killing elephants or whales.  And to what end?  To make a great big opaque wooden 'C' in a distant country.  It seems conceptually trivial and materially profligate.

Cirque de Soleil. Canadian pavilion, Shanghai Expo 2010

Bill Burns

Bill Burns. Safety Gear for Small Animals. Respirator, 10 x 11 x 6 cm, 1994/1999Bill Burns is originally from Saskatchewan, studied at Goldsmiths, now lives in Toronto, has work in major collections here and abroad.  He is best known for his series Safety Gear for Small Animals, 1996-2000, a collection of tiny helmets, gas masks, life jackets, hazmat suits and goggles for rats and gophers and other tiny neighbours.
 
Curiously the effect does not anthropomorphise the animals, the little life jackets simply remind us that we don't look after animals at all.  If not actively trying to exterminate them, we ignore them, so busy are we looking after ourselves as we elbow our way into the lifeboat, first leaving everyone else to go down with the ship. 

Safety Gear for Small Animals led to the more recent project, Boiler Suits for Primates, 2006 which is a suitcase of miniature versions of all the things given to people incarcerated at Guantanamo Bay: orange jumpsuits, rubber thongs, towels, a bucket, toothpaste.  These are considered the bleak essentials of life it seems, and by putting them into the context of Safety Gear for Small Animals, the parallel to zoos is undeniable.  Detainees are stripped of their humanity, but still given toothpaste.

The ambiguity between mankind and animalkind is the subject of Burns' work.  It is a similar project to that of Yann Martel who uses animals as eloquent voices of the blindly fumbling human condition.  George Orwell was another.  Somehow when the rather selfish ambitions of human beings are made to come out clear and pure from the mouths of animals who, if we think about them at all, we consider innocents, we are shocked.

cat's eyes

We don't see these cat's eyes road markings here, but they are used throughout Britain.  Two mirror-backed glass marbles reflect headlights at night and mark centre lines and road edges.  They can be white, red, yellow, green or blue indicating different road conditions.
They were invented in 1933 by Percy Shaw, who patented them and then set about manufacturing them.  The glass marbles are set in a rubber block mounted in a metal casting embedded in the road.  If a car drives over it, it is pushed into the road and the rubber decompresses after, raising it up again.  There is a small reservoir that collects rain which washes the glass marbles keeping them clean. 

In my youth I spent a summer in England with the Commonwealth Youth Movement, and we were billetted with various county families as we travelled about.  Staying somewhere in Yorkshire and driving home after some do we were at, no doubt at an army base, I noticed that my billetter turned off his headlights whenever we went through a village or small town, and then turned them on again when on the open road.  Not on full, just on dipped, which shines about 5' in front of the car.  It all seemed quite dark to me, not to say dangerous. 

However, then, you didn't put on your headlights while going through villages as they would shine into people's windows and disturb them, besides there were dim streetlights or light from other people's windows to give enough light to drive by.  On the open road, the cat's eyes caught even dipped headlights far enough ahead to be a sufficient guide.  Cars didn't go fast: small winding roads and small engines did not allow it, also the phrase 'mustn't frighten the horses' comes to mind.  Life was deferential, quiet, frugal, measured.  People invented things.  They were allowed to be eccentric, as evidently Percy Shaw became. 

I doubt that any of this exists anymore in our over-developed OECD countries, however, one could travel the world looking for quiet, frugal, measured, polite societies where life is slow rather than headlong, and I expect one would find people inventing things of great usefulness – an eccentric concept in itself.  

red desert 2

Monica Vitti and Richard Harris. Il deserto rosso. Michelangelo Antonioni, 1964

This is a trailer (which I can't figure out how to embed here) with the boppy kind of soundtrack typical of 1960s Italy.  It is misleading, as Giovanni Fusco's Il deserto rosso soundtrack is generally abstract and electronic, but if anything, this overly kooky music is the part of pop-Italy that also produced bright little Olivetti typewriters, the Isetta and Ettore Sottsass.
 
Antonioni's early films are black and white 1950s epics of bleak betrayal, then he did the black, white and red Il deserto rosso, then got to England and did Blow-Up in full colour – lots of decadent fun: the Red Desert party in Ravenna looks like kindergarten in comparison, then Zabriskie Point in Los Angeles where colour and consumer excess literally exploded all over the screen.   Italy hurtled from postwar, Carlo Scarpa sobriety to jangling technicolour instability so fast it lost its head and replaced it with Berlusconi. 

Despite the bizarreness of this assemblage of segments, it has a shot of an industrial landscape (between 1:30 and 1:40 – even better watch it in full screen), illustrating why I find Burtynsky's photos of industrial landscapes so didactic, so condescendingly instructive.  

the red desert

Thinking about the Isetta and the 1960s and, despite its current reputation, the space and quiet of many things of the late 60s and early 70s.  I once used to spend hours watching French and Italian films in London at inexpensive, near-empty matinee showings.  The Red Desert is an existential classic: 1964, not much of a plot, just a troubled woman, her general anxiety in the world; the world pretty colourless but also surreal in its industrial, unforgiving, spare unbeauty.  Long stretches without dialogue, most of it shot with a telephoto lens – God how I loved this stuff.  It was my interior landscape, and often my exterior one as well. 
This very small clip is completely typical:

I must say, despite all those endless classes in the urbane civic landscapes of a Europe we were taught to aspire to, these grey streets were more like what I found there.  Even in the late 1980s, a train stop away from Barcelona landed you in streets like this: suspicious, empty, grudging.

voiturettes

Iso IsettaThere used to be an Isetta parked on my street, perhaps the most minimal car possible.  Generally known as micro-cars and big in postwar Japan and Europe, the Daimler Smart is our current version, which, no surprise somehow, was originally developed by Swatch in the late 1980s and taken to Mercedes-Benz.  Smart fortwos are okay, but lack the charm of the Isetta, which was at least pretty.  Isetta was originally developed by Iso SpA in Turin in 1953, and then licensed to other manufacturers such as BMW.  They are 90" long by 54" wide, 770 lbs. 
Best site for pictures is the Microcar Museum

The micro-cars of the 50s used 2-stroke motorcycle motors and were essentially enclosed motor scooters, but with a steering wheel rather than cycle handles.  One got in and out of the Isetta through the front which was one big door with the steering wheel and dashboard panel attached.  Gina in Heartbeat used to have one before she got her pale blue VW Beetle.
The Isetta had four wheels, but there were many other lines of tiny cars with three-wheels – reportedly the earliest of cars from the 1880s.  Three wheels have a few stability problems, this is why the Isetta put two wheels quite close together at the back.   Three-wheelers are still being developed, including the Campagna T-Rex in Montréal which is too obviously a muscular motorcycle with a ghastly fibreglas carapace pulled out of a computer game. 

Much has been on the news lately about speed, accidents and Calgary roads.  I would hesitate to take a microcar onto Deerfoot Trail, in fact I don't even take my very nimble, very fast saab onto Deerfoot Trail – it is a suicidal road.  But there are plenty of other roads with less pressure on them.  Speeds are 50-60 rather than 110; you get there.  Although contemporary microcars have normal-car running speeds, little cars like the Isetta had 50kph as their top speed: they are cars for cities, which, last time I heard, most of us live in.  

the Holzweg

Arndt Menke-Zumbrägel. Holzweg, 2008Arndt Menke's wood bike uses wood as a sophisticated material, rather than a low-tech material that shows its vegetative lineage.  There is a standard set of images of the Holzweg, found on several design websites, that show its details, parts and assembly.

Arndt Menke-Zumbrägel. Holzweg. Laminated bentwood back wheel strut.It is possible that this too is mainly a bamboo bicycle as the photos show wood tubes for the frame pieces.  Reamed wood wouldn't be as strong as bamboo with its hollow integrity.  The most interesting part, a bentwood, laminated back wheel strut, is not, as far as I can find, discussed at all. The bentwood piece is laminated from four shaped pieces and then shaped to fit into the tubular metal lugs.  This would give it both strength and spring, giving some suspension movement in the back wheel.

Arndt Menke-Zumbruagel. Holzweg. Forming the bentwood back wheel strut.The frame weighs 2.3 kg.  A comparably responsive ride, a full suspension frame, ranges from 2kg to 5kg (2.8 for aluminum might be typical). 

We've gone through a long period of time where as individuals we have been told we can't make anything ourselves.  We certainly can't fix our own cars, where once everyone was his own mechanic.  What I like about all these wood bikes is that one could actually make one without a metal workshop, without welding equipment and a welding ticket.  These bikes are about assembly of parts, rather than sealed monolithic units, bought ready to go and only repairable by professionals.  That just seems so disengaged now.


bambucicletas

Having been away from my home and native land for four months, in my other home and native land, I have been surprisingly disoriented since being back.  After looking at  a small house project Saturday in the far south west, I came back with the contractor I generally work with when I do such things so he could collect his old Sawsall which I borrowed four years ago to hack out some joists set too high for a floor I was replacing.  It was a long story and brute violence was needed to solve it.  Anyway, my front room was a mess: half unpacked, stacks of papers everywhere.  I bleated 'magazine', 'moving', 'ill', 'too much', etc.  and then spent the rest of the afternoon simply clearing my work table.  I now have a tidy stack of little notes of ideas.  I have similar stacks in each room – neat things I read, or hear on the radio, or think of, fascinating bits of news.  What to do with these little notes, each worthy of a dissertation at least.  If I work through them here for a bit, I can throw them away.  It won't be a series of dissertations, but I can air them and let them go.

This is the danger of misc files: they are brilliant, and unwieldly, and provocative, and oppressive, inducing much guilt that one is not pursuing them, working them out, making connections.

So.  Bamboo bikes

First patented in 1894, bamboo frames are lightweight, responsive and quiet. Bamboo is evidently 17% stronger than steel in certain directions.  Craig Calfee in Santa Cruz has been producing high-tech bamboo bikes for several years and is the acknowledged expert, although bamboo bikes have long been built in China.

Calfee Bamboo Cargo bike, built in Ghana. The back wheel is bamboo-reinforced and capable of carrying 640 lbs.The straight pieces are heat treated bamboo.  Instructables has step-by-step  instructions on how to build such a bike: it mortices the bamboo together at the joints and then makes hemp and fibreglas reinforced wrappings around the joints.  Better pictures are here.

The other way to join the pieces is to use carbon fibre, steel or other metal pre-formed lugs into which the bamboo poles fit.  Otherwise, one needs all the rest of the parts: chain, wheels and brakes recycled from ordinary bikes.  The front fork is often metal it seems, rather than bamboo: something to do with stability.

The Bamboo Bike Project in Ghana, Kenya and other African countries was started by several people in different research units at the Earth Institute, Columbia University. BBP is setting up bamboo bike production in local workshops, with local bamboo, that are sturdier than metal bikes and more suited to carrying loads over rough roads. 

There are, of course, obsessives who are working to make everything out of bamboo as a kind of pure design exercise.  Flavio Deslandes is a Brasilian industrial designer living in Denmark. His bike uses a back brake which is much more elegant than all those cables.  Evidently there is much research into bamboo spokes, but couldn't find any pics except for the bamboo reinforcing on the cargo bike above.

Flavio Deslandes. Bambucicleta. Rio de JaneiroIt's all quite exciting, and there are pages of websites, so it must be quite a common project.  I just hadn't heard of it. 

last week

How easy it is to break a routine and how hard to get back to it.
 
Last week drove 1100 km from from summer back into winter, from one culture to another, much the same as driving from Paris to Madrid or in distance, from St Petersburg to Moscow and back again.
 
Last week got On Site 23: small things to the printer.  They have bought a new Heidelburg press, an enormous thing the size and appearance of a locomotive engine.  Everything that was in the space it now occupies has been shuffled about – lots of untaped drywall everywhere, z-shaped corridors – but that's okay, there is this new princess in the building that everything defers to.

Getting an issue to the printer is a horrible marathon of moving commas, getting names spelled right, aligning images.  It goes on and on for days ending only when I force the layout onto a cd and deliver it, otherwise I would shoot myself.
 
Last week I unpacked, in a manner of speaking: I took things out of small packages whereupon they exploded all over and I can't find anywhere for them to go.  It would be nice to throw everything away.  Clearly I have too much stuff.  As a corrective I shall look at Jens Thiel's  monobloc site again:

Hannes Geiseler. Plastic chair repair, India, 2009

Fairey Marine hot-moulded hulls

Fairey Marine, Hamble, England. A hot-moulded mahogany hull.

Back to plywood.  In the next issue of On Site: small things, we have an article by Charles Lawrence who writes about Fairey Marine which took Fairey Aviation's wartime wood laminate experience in making aircraft to the making of powerboats in the 1950s and 60s.  They built up a monococque hull with six layers of wood glued in cross directions over a solid block form, and then the whole lot was baked at boiling point in an autoclave, producing a lightweight nearly indestructible hull.
 
It was in a white Fairey Huntress that James Bond chased his enemies, in Fairey Huntsmans, in From Russia With Love.  Wonderfully evocative names for these boats: Fantome, Swordsman, Spearfish.  Fleet and nimble, slicing through the waves, many are still in the water.  

The hot-moulded Fairey hull, like the moulded Eames chairs, eventually went over to fibreglas and, I expect, much of the magic was lost. 
  

the monobloc plastic chair

Simon Palfrey. 8-year-old Kunde boy with ruptured appendix, being carried 12 hours and 25 km in this chair to local airstrip for evacuation to Kathmandu.While looking for an image of the original Eames splint used during the Second World War, the technology of which led to his chair experiments, I came across this use of an ordinary plastic lawn chair in Katmandu being used for emergency transport.  Its light weight and rigidity would be key here.

Jens Thiel, who is working on a book, a documentary and an exhibition on monobloc plastic chairs, has a website full of pictures of these chairs in all settings, in all variations, all kinds of repairs and uses. 

designboom.com has a short history of monobloc plastic chair development.  They are cheap – $3 to make, and they are made all over the world. Although polypropylene is recyclable they are too big for our blue bins and are often found in fragments set out with the garbage, and living in the rich west as we do, we rarely see the inventive uses found by Thiel or the repairs and re-use.  Thiel points out that inexpensive as they are, they are still equal to a day's salary in many places, and so are valued, helped along when they get elderly, repaired lovingly.

Jens Thiel and Daniel Spehr. Rapaired backrest, sewen with wire.

the Eames chair

Charles Eames. Patent Drawing, 1951. Library of CongressWe have an article about the Eames chair in the next issue of On Site: small things.  Melissa Jacques writes about its iconicity and its marketing, sixty years after its invention.  While looking for an image for the article, I came across one of the patent drawings submitted by Charles Eames in 1942.  It shows that originally the moulded bucket had material taken out of its stress points.  It somehow seems more plastic this way: one can see the original sheet material and how it is bent, a quality completely lost in the fibreglas shells that quickly followed, although I remember fibreglas chairs with an oval hole cut out at the lower back.  I thought they were for ventilation maybe, not thinking much about it at all.  It is interesting that something can be made stronger with the removal of material, rather than building it up to a state of rigidity.

Much of this moulded plywood technology was developed for wartime applications: airplanes, which are still very flexible, and famously in the Eames' case, for limb splints — both applications lightweight and shapely.  The plywood Eames Chair really is the hallmark of 1950s furniture whether it be Danish or American Modern.  Soon supplanted by fibreglas and wire mesh, and most masking of all, upholstery, all this thin, lightweight industrially processed furniture lost its wartime connections very quickly.  Jacques says that it still has its original über-cool quality however, and I wonder if this is something inherent in the way the form was made that we still  intuitively understand, rather than any amount of marketing. 
Charles and Ray Eames. Moulded Plywood Chair. Library of Congress

Angela de la Cruz

Angela de la Cruz. Self Flat AshameA new exhibition in London of Angela de la Cruz is written about in the Guardian today.  de la Cruz does broken canvases on stretchers, starting off with a regular painting and then breaking it, literally, apart.  Then she breaks other things apart, notably chairs, which collide with the canvases, canvases collide with the walls and so on.  It appears to be powerful work; she's been working this way for 15 years.  One of the pieces, Flat Stuck is shown here in the background of the image of Self Flat Ashame above.  Flat Stuck is the collapsed orange stacking chair.

I don't think this chair is one of the old Eames fibreglas shells, or one of its plastic knock-offs, but it is similar: a bare bones chair, the most vulnerable point being where the legs attach to the shell. 

de la Cruz is saying a number of things in her work about vulnerability and about the act of selection that transforms a throw away bit of ruin into an intentional art piece.  Duchamp lives, but his ideas are so naturalised that they rarely are acknowledged any more.  de la Cruz herself talks about the problem with painting: slashing a canvas animates it: painting's grandiosity is removed and although it is still a painting, its object nature is made extreme.

I must agree.  After thinking about this work and then going back and looking at a conventionally hung flat canvas on the gallery wall, it does seem to be arch, coy, carrying ambitions on its surface it cannot possibly fulfil.  

Easter, April 2010

P Gold. Spring wreaths on the Lion's Gate Bridge lions. Vancouver BC