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Great Podcast on Architecture: On Buildings & Cities

Former Air Force Base in Aguadilla

Ramey Airforce Base-wall art and structures:

Vallejo Nocturno 2022-Ramey Air Force Base

 

Learning About Luigi Ghirri

 

From a discussion at Aperture with the curator of a Luigi Ghirri photo exhibition:

Michael Famighetti: The installation for The Idea of Building was quite beautiful and worked so well in the Matthew Marks Gallery space, which has the feel of a modest chapel. How did this project come to be?

Matt Connors: I have been a Ghirri fan for a long time, and a conversation developed with the gallery about me curating a show. The first time they showed Ghirri was in a Thomas Demand–curated show, so I think they were interested in me to see what would happen, because I wasn’t a photographer, but was someone invested in his work. 

Famighetti: Did you work closely with the Ghirri estate on the selection?

Connors: I went to Italy to the archive to meet with Adele, his daughter. Before that, I was buying every Ghirri book. I was freaked out because of how admired and loved he is in the photography world, and I felt acutely aware that I was not a photographer. But I kept digging in on my personal research and wrote a minithesis to send to Adele. And then I went in January 2020, one of my last trips before the COVID-19 pandemic. The archive is in what was once Ghirri’s house; it was an absolute fantasy.

Famighetti: What vision of Ghirri did you present to the estate?

Connors: The process of choosing a Ghirri photograph is kind of like a psychological intake, because there is so much, many different bodies of work; it involves confessing what you like.

After looking at many images, I started to dig out a vision of him as a painter. It sounds self-serving, but because I’m making paintings all day, putting color together materially, I started to see that parallel so clearly in his work.

In the book Project Prints (2012), which is about how he would make contact prints and cut them out and make little maquettes to play with, you can see that the materiality of his approach was key. He was obsessed with building, actually building things—like making tables, folders, and containers—and that just seemed so present in the work. That became the paradigm. I think his entry into art-making via the drawing that was part of his cartography and surveying work set the stage for him to use photography in a more tactile, painterly, material way.

Famighetti: Ghirri was also a prolific author of concise reflections on photography, and he wrote about how he didn’t take pictures, or compose pictures, but rather saw himself as creating things from images—your building angle seems to naturally emerge from his thinking.

Connors: Yes, and there was a nervousness that the title—The Idea of Building—would read as if the show was about architecture. (I had just seen a show that was all about his photographs connected to architecture.) But I did use a few photos he took of Aldo Rossi’s studio, and there are a few others included that are focused on architectural frameworks. He would go back and then make photographs based on his surveying work. Architecture is embedded in how he sees.

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Some Photographs from the Katharina Grosse BMA Work

From 2011 Trip to India-Jama Masjid Mosque

Vallejo Nocturno 2021-The Mosque

From Britanica:

Jama Masjid is Delhi’s principal mosque, the place where the city’s Muslims traditionally gather for Friday communal prayer; Jama Masjid is Arabic for “Friday mosque.” The mosque is near the Red Fort, yet another of Shah Jahān’s buildings. Jama Masjid and its courtyard stand on an outcropping more than 30 steps higher than the street, giving the mosque a commanding view of the surrounding area. The longer name, Masjid-i Jahānnumā, translates to “world-reflecting mosque” or “world-displaying mosque.” The mosque was built by a crew of some 5,000 workers. The principal construction material was red sandstone, but some white marble was also used.

Jama Masjid is oriented toward the holy city of Mecca, Saudi Arabia, which lies to the west. An open courtyard facing the eastern gateway of the mosque building is at least 325 feet (99 metres) square and can accommodate 25,000 people. The eastern gateway itself was originally reserved for royal use exclusively. Others used smaller gates on the north and south sides of the building. Two 130-foot (40-metre) minarets mark the northeast and southeast corners of the building. The largest interior space is the prayer hall, 90 × 200 feet (27.4 × 60.96 metres). Above the prayer hall’s entrances are calligraphic inscriptions in Persian. Three large marble domes rise from the prayer hall’s roof.

In the 21st century Jama Masjid was the scene of two violent incidents possibly connected with terrorism. In 2006 13 people were injured when two bombs went off in shopping bags left in the courtyard, and in 2010 two people were wounded in an attack by gunmen on a tourist bus parked outside the mosque.

Walkthrough of Se de Lisboa

I found this excellent video of the ancient Se de Lisboa (Lisboa Cathedral) it's a compelling way to show the character of a structure.

Baltimore's Penn Station

We read recently that the Baltimore Penn Station (our railroad station) was up for some transformations. With that we saw design plans for a new terminal that looked very different from the current configuration. Before everything gets changed we said we should take some photos to document its current state. Here are a few of those pics.

Vallejo Nocturno 2020- Baltimore's Penn Station

Feng Shui Dilema

From The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg writes:

Do not say that Donald Trump failed to build his wall. He built it. But he built it in Washington, D.C., not along the southern border, and he built it to shield himself from his fellow citizens, not to shield his fellow citizens from the existential threat posed by Mexican job-seekers.

The White House today is hidden behind a welter of barricades, anti-scale fencing, bollards, and Jersey barriers. The tens of thousands of people who flooded downtown D.C. in a celebratory release of pent-up anti-Trump feeling this weekend could barely see the people’s house. Lafayette Square, the scene of one of Trump’s most vulgar assaults on core American values, is now impenetrable. The White House fortress is a physical manifestation of Trump’s loathing for transparency and accountability, and it should be undone. The decent thing for Trump to do—though he seldom declines an opportunity to do the indecent thing—would be to disassemble this crude obstacle course before he leaves Washington for good.

Most presidents have taken seriously the idea of the White House as the “people’s house.” Most have not gone as far as Andrew Jackson (a hero of Trump’s), who let a mob of his supporters overrun the house on Inauguration Day (something Trump would never do, given the way he actually feels about his supporters), but most presidents understand the nature of their tenancy. The house is meant to be the home of a citizen chosen by other citizens to lead the executive branch for a finite period. It is definitively not meant to be a palace.

Like many reporters who have worked—either periodically or daily—at the White House, my view of the place borders on mystical. (My feelings about the men who have occupied the Oval Office are generally not so gauzy.) The White House, like the Capitol and the Supreme Court, represents high ideals made manifest. These buildings should not be hidden. It’s the role of the current occupant of the White House to make sure that it is as accessible—or at least as visible—as possible.

This is not a complaint about security. I’ve visited the White House as a reporter since the days when cars were allowed to drive right by it. The decision to close Pennsylvania Avenue to traffic in 1995 was controversial, but it made sense, after the Oklahoma City bombing, as did the imposition of additional security measures following the terrorist attacks of 9/11. The ban had an upside, though: Freeing Pennsylvania Avenue of cars opened it to people. On sunny days, hundreds, even thousands, of visitors would take in the grandeur of the White House from just outside its fence.

Of course, would-be jumpers saw the wrought-iron fence as a temptation; in 2014, one made it over and into the building itself. At that point, the Secret Service and the National Park Service began planning for a new White House fence that would be twice as tall, replacing the ugly array of improvised barricades. Six years later, that new fence remains under construction.

The goal of a new fence was to make the White House safe, and visible. But Trump turned the White House into his own personal Green Zone. Fear has shaped both his message and his behavior over the past four years. Trump displayed nearly as much disrespect for the White House as he did for the presidency itself.

I have not visited the White House much during this presidency, particularly after this magazine published a cover story in early 2019 calling for Trump’s impeachment. One of my last visits came in May of 2018, for lunch with Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and majordomo. The main topic of conversation was the Middle East, but as I was leaving, I registered my unhappiness with something egregious his father-in-law had just said (I have no recollection of the details, given the quantity and velocity of insults emanating from this White House). Kushner smiled and said, “No one can go as low as the president. You shouldn’t even try.” It took me a beat to realize that he meant this as a compliment to Trump, not as a criticism.

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Lincoln and Trump

Vallejo Nocturno 2020-Lincoln from Abandon Capital series

From LARB, Diane Depardo-Minsky discusses the Lincoln Memorial and Trump's use of it:

Daniel Chester French successfully democratized his statue of Lincoln by showing the president fully dressed in the attire of his fellow citizens and holding no attributes of power, whether staff or sheathed sword. Other than the material (marble), hierarchy of scale (Lincoln measures 19 feet tall), and seated pose, only one vestige of the antique tradition remains: fasces. Fasces, or bundles of sticks, adorn the front of Lincoln’s armrests. Carried by lictors, the bodyguards of elected officials in ancient Rome, fasces illustrated how one thin rod gains strength when bound together with its equals. In the Roman Republic, fasces functioned as symbols of the authority and the motto of the state, SPQR (Senatus Populusque Romanus: the Senate and the People of Rome). Outside the pomerium, or sacred city limits of Rome, lictors’ fasces included an axe to show the magistrate’s power over life and death. Arms, whether lictors’ axes or soldiers’ swords, were not permitted inside the pomerium unless the Senate granted a general a triumphal procession. As in the American Republic, the representatives of the people checked and controlled imperium.

Emulating Rome, the Founding Fathers chose fasces, these tightly bound sticks, as a visual representation of our motto, E Pluribus Unum (From Many, One), and fasces adorn many public buildings, including the seats of all three branches of government. Since 1789, the mace or scepter of the House of Representatives has had a fascis as its handle. On top, a globe and eagle replace the axe. The mace is carried into the House to open sessions and presides there, on a pedestal, throughout the term. Two further fasces, sculpted in the mid-19th century, ornament the wall behind the Speaker’s rostrum. These have axe heads, perhaps to emphasize that only the House, the most democratic of the three branches, has the right to declare war. At the Supreme Court, fasces appear on the west facade pediment and in the frieze above the bench of the Justices. In the White House, horizontal fasces lie above the doors of the Oval Office. These ubiquitous emblems reference the citizenry as the source of authority. The significance of this symbol is probably not obscure to many who serve in the government: during particularly important legislation or hearings, the current Speaker wears a pin replicating the mace of the House.

The Lincoln monument uses fasces to characterize both Lincoln’s accomplishments and the people as the source of political power. Seated in triumphant peace, the martyred president’s long, elegant fingers rest on top of fasces, a reminder that Lincoln preserved these United States and that the will of the people, exercised by the House of Representatives, granted him imperium to do so. Thus, in perpetuity, these ancient republican symbols both support and stand guard (like lictors) of the man who saved the nation.   

In Trump’s use of the Lincoln Memorial, these vertical fasces also play a critical role. They lead the viewers’ eyes down from the majestic effigy to a diminutive Trump and his interlocutors, all perched on portable chairs. This hierarchy of scale, of importance, coupled with the symmetrical positioning of Trump and the journalists around the statue on the central axis emphasize the chasm between the two presidents: one, a lawyer who rose from poverty to power through education, eloquence, and integrity to die for our national salvation and the expansion of rights; the other, a son of privilege, with little erudition and fewer ethics, who uses bigotry to divide and denigrate the populace.

The fasces also point to a temperamental difference between the two men. Lincoln sits parallel to them, facing forward into the present and future. Similarly, the Speaker of the House and the Supreme Court Justices, stand or sit parallel, though in front of, the fasces in their halls. Backed by these ancient symbols, they shape the future with their decisions. In the Fox image, however, Trump sits perpendicular to the fasces, signaling a shift in the course of the state. His directional departure recalls that exactly 100 years ago, between 1919 and 1922, Mussolini perverted this sign of republican rule into the name and the emblem of a totalitarian regime: the fasces became a double-edged sword — or axe — with two opposing meanings. Trump and his enablers’ ignorance of visual composition, symbolism, and history created a picture which, upon close inspection, does not align Trump with Lincoln but presents him as a small man turning toward fascism.

My Day in DC

Spent Tuesday in DC to observe the lack of people on the streets by the memorials. Here is a sampling:

Vallejo Nocturno 2020- In DC in August during a pandemic