A Thousand Years Ago

The country of Myanmar (Burma) has just recently opened up for unimpeded tourist travel, and I jumped up at the opportunity to see this little-visited place. What I saw was an impoverished and polluted capital city, a lush but not spectacular landscape, vital street life so common in that part of the world – in other words, a not entirely unexpected picture.

Except for one thing.

Back in 10th century, in the middle of what now is Burma, there was a small but strong kingdom of Bagan. The story goes that a Buddhist monk had arrived to the court of Bagan’s king Anawrahta, and in a short period of time managed not only to convert the king to Buddhism, but to turn him into a true religious zealot. The king started construction of many temples, with more and more added by his successors. In the course of two and a half centuries, over 4000 temples were built on the planes of Bagan.  Most of them are still there. From high terraces, one can experience a breathtaking sunset view, the land alive with countless spires as far as the eye can see.

There is a great mystery in this solitary architectural breakthrough. Why did it happen there, and nowhere else? The scale, clarity, and pure beauty of the entire concept are simply unprecedented. The Burmese military government was fast to recognize the significance of Bagan temples, and they engaged in various measures of protection – from restoration of earthquake-damaged structures to forceful resettlement of local residents, whose shacks tended to “spoil the picture”.

On my way back, riding in an old taxi through beat-up streets of sprawling Yangon, I was thinking about the sad reality of a country, whose greatest achievement came and went a thousand years ago.

Return of Curiosity

Curiosity as a concept has a long history. In 17^th-18^th century, the Kunstkammer (the Cabinets of Wonders) proliferated in Europe. One of the categories of artifacts on display was called curiosa: objects, materials, and natural specimens from faraway lands.  Those exotic items were kept to arouse curiosity – a notion that since the age of geographic discoveries was synonymous with quest for knowledge.

In the orthodox Modernist thinking curiosity was not a key concept, and it fell out of fashion. Gradually, it got relegated into the realm of low-brow idle preoccupations, akin to gawking and rubbernecking.  By the 1990s, designers were more concerned with questions of style and taste.

When our book Curuous Boym was published in 2002, in a short introduction, I wrote about the monkey Curious George as a role model for our profession:

He is driven by curiosity to play and experiment with elements of his daily environment. He finds new uses for familiar objects, invents different ways of doing things, tests the limits of materials and objects. Many of his experiments don’t work, and he routinely gets in trouble, but occasionally he reaps praise or a medal. This sounds a lot like designer’s life.

In the second decade of the new century, this is no longer a revelation. “There are myriad forms of design, many of which don’t require movement of materials and artifacts; only curiosity, an internet connection, and the ability to seek, learn, and synthesize from other fields and cultures. These mutants are the future of design,” writes Paola Antonelli. The notion of curiosity has made a spectacular comeback.  I do not know who named the NASA Rover on Mars, yet it is very fitting that this incredible machine carries the name of one of the most endearing human characteristics.

In the last week of August 2012, “curiosity” had a distinction of being the most searched word on Google. Curious George would have been proud.

For Body and Soul

Mimar Sinan, the great architect of the Ottoman Empire, lived a long life. By the time of his death in 1588, at the age of 98, he has completed an impressive list of over three hundred buildings. Among them, there are 48 buildings of hamam – Turkish communal bathhouses. Initially, I was surprised that the architect of the grandest mosques of his day would be involved in something so small and unprepossessing as a public bathhouse.  A visit to one of his still functioning hamams in Istanbul (Çemberlitaş Hamami) is an experience to understand both the impact of this great master’s work, and the essence of Turkish bath.

Hamam is like a mosque in miniature. One enters into a round space, crowned by a cupola. Through the steam, light shines from above, from a pattern of small round openings. Everything is in white, well-aged marble. In the middle, there is a large round marble podium where bathers are invited to lie and soak before washing. (Men’s and women’s sections are, obviously, separated, but the bath building is completely symmetrical, and the female half is identical to the male one. At least in the bathing ritual Muslim men and women always had equal rights.)

The experience of lying on the warm marble table under the piercing light is almost spiritual. The idea of cleansing assumes a symbolic meaning, as if all your unclear confusing thoughts could just melt away.  Later comes a physical wash, in shape of a robust bath attendant who soaps and massages you, then leaves you on the marble slab to continue your meditation.  Steam bath of Christian tradition – small crowded space of the sauna or the Russian steam room – never approaches this sense of openness and harmony.

I wish there was a bathhouse by Le Corbusier or Frank Lloyd Wright somewhere for comparison, yet I doubt they’d rival the old baths of Sinan.

The Dark Side

In the Northern Italian town of Bassano di Grappa, there is a beautiful bridge of Palladio’s design, Ponte degli Alpini. On one side, an old vertical house contains a nice-looking tavern, which I chose for a late-afternoon drink. I was surprised to find out that the tavern had a small museum on two levels below the drinking floor, entrance free of charge. A bit hesitantly, I descended several flights of narrow steps into the Museo degli Alpini – and into another world.

The Alpini, or the Alpine brigades, were the elite regiments of the Italian Army, specially trained to fight in the mountain terrain.  They were formed in 1870s, at the outset of the Italy’s unification to protect the country’s northern mountainous borders. But the first big warfare for the Alpine brigades came with the beginning of World War I.  The action became known as the “War of Snow and Ice”, with most of the front lines running through the highest peaks and glaciers of the Alps. It was estimated that 12,000 Alpines, one out of every three enlisted, had died in the course of this campaign.

The lowest floor of the museum was, in fact, devoted to the years of WWI. One would need W.G.Sebald to describe the impact of objects on display, things that often defied description.  I’ll cite only a few examples, from memory:
-Gas masks (chemical warfare was a common tactic), including gas masks for horses, mules, and also for dogs; 
-Small cages for canaries, which would signal presence of the gas;
-Devilish devices for installing barbed wire in field, which looked like huge corkscrews (since one could not hammer the posts in without attracting enemy’s attention);
-The opposite set of devices for cutting barbed wire of the enemy;
-Outfits for fighting in extreme cold and snow, such as enormous overboots with six-inch wooden soles, or anti-ice glasses with opaque metal lenses, with only tiniest holes provided for vision;
-Horrendous spikes and hooks that attached to boots, for non-slipping on the glaciers;
-Horseshoes with similar spikes;
-Medical equipment of all kinds, such as metal wire stabilizers for legs, arms, and head, and also a wire face mask, which could hold a cotton swab soaked in analgesics;
-And so on.

It is hard to imagine that someone conceived and made these kinds of objects for people to use. The very notion of morality gets suspended. How many lives have been saved by these terrifying gismos? How many people were killed because of them? In narrow sense, many objects demonstrate technical and functional elegance, yet the very fact of their superior functionality calls for a larger question: why would people want to do this to each other?

It is no wonder that these kinds of objects, their power notwithstanding, are never included in any design anthology, never shown in a design exhibition.  Architecture and design are too often presented as a life-affirming, optimistic enterprise. We try not to think about the dark side. Until we stop to admire a Palladio’s bridge, and stumble into memories of the War of Snow and Ice.

Extra National Journey

What happens when a Russian-born American professor takes a group of his Arab students to a workshop in Amsterdam to work with a designer who has a Canadian passport but lives in Berlin?

National identities clash with globalization: this is a reality of today’s world, and reverberations of this conflict are evident in contemporary design discourse. On one hand, the national is still much valued as a precious cultural resource. On this topic, in a recent issue of Domus, MoMA Design Curator Paola Antonelli  recently wrote about “digging deep into local culture in order to achieve the universal sublime”. Notes Antonelli: “Local traditions have in recent decades proved to be the most meaningful way to move beyond modernism without giving up the great qualities of modern design”. 

On the other hand, there’s no denying that our global village is getting more standardized. Developments with the internet have both facilitated and enabled a globally homogeneous way of banking, manufacturing, commerce, branding and pop-culture. The world of young people, in particular, is a unified one in which music, fashion, games and social media have become a global infrastructure that stretches far beyond national borders. These people live in the era of Google Earth, which allows them to zoom in on any country or city without leaving their computers.  One of the missions of design education today is to address this complex condition, and to uncover strategies for its creative exploitation.

Nicolas Bouriaud’s The Radicant (Lucas and Stenberg, New York, 2009), lays out a promising theoretical framework for artists’ and designers’ work in the first decades of the new century. The notion of radicant comes from botany: it is “a term designating an organism that grows its roots and adds new ones as it advances”. According to Bouriaud: “To be radicant means setting one’s roots in motion, staging them in heterogeneous contexts and formats … translating ideas, transcoding images, transplanting behaviors, exchanging rather than imposing.” Instead of postmodern games with history and heritage typically expressed through use of signs and décor, this new work is characterized by formlessness and temporality: it favors process over object, the journey over the destination.

The ideas in this prescient book have been recently put into action in a joint workshop set up between VCUQatar in Doha and the Sandberg Institute in Amsterdam, and based on the notion of Extra National Style, a theme proposed by Jerszy Seymour (Director of the Dirty Art Department at Sandberg).  The idea of Extra National defies easy definition: it is not a fusion of cultures (such as might be favored by Postmodernism) nor does it require abandoning all cultural references in favor of a single unified language, as was the case with International style — a solution still in evidence in many airports and public spaces still today.

If anything, the notion of Extra National recalls a much older concept, that of cosmopolitanism: the belief that all humans belong to one single global community based on a shared morality. When the ancient Greek philosopher Diogenes was asked where he was from, he famously replied that he was a citizen of the world, or a cosmopolite. In contemporary thinking, cosmopolitanism questions the inevitability of nation-states and advocates the world political system that promotes personal freedom and individual opportunity. An essential feature of cosmopolitanism is respect for otherness, which implies an acknowledgement of religious and cultural differences. “I hate border controls, but I love different food and cheeses,” says Jerszy Seymour.

Working in Extra National style does not mean leaving behind the idea of national belonging, but rather making a selective inventory of what is worth keeping and asking why.  As students tried to grasp and define the idea, words like “fluid”,  “intangible” and “unreachable” dominated the discussion, until the group started to focus on the moment — the here-and-now. Indeed, the essence of this project could well be defined by its unique and multinational list of participants, assembled somewhat miraculously together in one space. The large empty studio, sheathed entirely in seamless blue plastic that was itself devoid of any specific cultural references, had become the stage of Extra National action.

In this new environment, students’ national backgrounds appeared to have been suspended. Two Israeli students worked and made friends with kids from Lebanon and Qatar­ — something that just could never happen in the course of their regular lives. Qatari girls temporarily shed their black abayas; Dutch girls joined in chanting traditional Arab songs. Students were invited to transform the blue space as needed in the process of their daily work.

Initial ideas focused on students’ basic needs as human beings: establishing a ritual of one minute of breathing, or sending containers of air from country to country in exchange. From the study of air the attention turned to music — a truly Extra National phenomenon, especially for young people. A group of students proposed an interactive musical map of the world, an invisible auditory presence open for browsing and adding one’s own voice. Another team worked on the needs of their working space, offering a collection of Intangible Furniture: they were multifunctional toy-like fragments, capable of personalized configurations. The entire class happily joined in exploration of the system’s combinatory possibilities.

Intrigued by the observations of the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek (who famously analyzed the difference between German, American, and French toilet bowls as the key to the three nations’ ideological differences) the next group examined a quintessentially human need, setting out to create a prototype of an Extra National toilet. The project ended up as an outhouse and was constructed outside of the school building. Its pentagon shape corresponded to five dissimilar ways of use from five different continents, all unified with one common drain hole.

In the Extra National world, all ideas will belong to everyone as material for translation and re-interpretation. This was the premise of The Cloud, a performance project by three students, which marked the end of the workshop. On the last day they collected materials from all the other group presentations. The participants’ objects, fragments and leftovers were piled high in the middle of the studio, together with all unused materials.  Reciting a manifesto, performers gradually tore the blue plastic film off all walls, wrapping the debris and creating a monumental ephemeral sculpture.  This literal “wrapping up” of the workshop was suggestive of endless transformative possibilities: all the pieces and ideas remained inside, ready for further discussion and regeneration.

The following day, the students headed to the airport and returned to their home countries. The world order has been restored. So what did everyone learn from this experience?

One could question whether or not those interactions in the blue space could even be considered design at all.  After all, there were no viable products or constructive proposals put forth, as might have been required by a conventional practice of a design workshop. The action at Sandberg Institute suggests that conventional wisdom does not apply to the design professions any longer. The field has opened up for all kinds of existential queries that question the way people live, work, or communicate.  By definition, these questions cannot lead to a singular answer. Rather, the argument is brought up again and again, by every new generation. This open-ended quest for meaning ­ is likely to dominate our professional efforts for decades to come, with young designers of all nations taking part. Students of the world, unite!

Learning from the King

If there was one reason to travel to East German city of Dresden, it would be to see the unique collections of objects and art, amassed by the Elector (King) of Saxony, Augustus the Strong (1670-1733).

Of all Dresden museums the most unusual is, definitely, the King’s treasure chamber, known here as the Green Vault (Grüne Gewölbe). The display, accessible to selected visitors already in the 18^th century, was conceived as an early example of gesamtkunstwerk – a total work of art – where the objects, the setting, and the passage through rooms were carefully planned to form a complete aesthetic experience.

There is, of course, plenty of gold, silver, and ivory on display. Yet other materials that attracted my attention were unexpected:  coconuts, ostrich eggs, Nautilus shells, Seychelles nuts, rhinoceros horns, even cherry pits. The interest in these exotic materials, stimulated by the age of geographic discoveries, was common among the European royal courts at the time. This was the period when the kunstkammer (the cabinets of wonders) proliferated in Europe, where the objects from faraway lands were stored and displayed. Those “curiouse” items were kept to arouse curiosity – a concept that in the 17^th-18^th century was synonymous with quest for knowledge. Yet the Green Vault is not merely a kunstkammer. Every shell and coconut – those signifiers of the exotic, “the other”– were sent to court artisans to be re-worked, re-combined, re-interpreted into new decorative objects. As with most treasure art, the functional requirements were nil. It was all about the effect, the surprise, the complexity. Apparently, the king presented his artisans with an aesthetic carte blanche, where the only requirement was an impeccable quality of craftsmanship.

To call these strange material collages eclectic would be both an understatement and simplification. Nicolas Bourriaud in his book The Radicant talks about creolization, “a process involving acclimatization and cross-breading of heterogeneous influences”, as a major determinant of contemporary art. This concept is perhaps applicable here. The meaning of king’s precious objects lies in joyous juxtaposition of cultures, in the sense of wonder about our wide and strange world, in the belief that beauty can unite and conquer all. Three hundred years later, these sentiments still resonate.

Authentic Moss

I was 9 months pregnant with my son Bobby, and considered myself a lucky designer. In 1997, the world was my oyster, professionally and personally. Four years out of graduate school and into a professional design career, our studio, Boym Partners, was rocking the supermarkets of Europe and the aisles of Target with plastic containers produced by a revolutionary German company called Authentics. All of a sudden, I found out from a friend that the go-to NYC design retailer, MOSS, was paying attention to our work.

I finally met Murray and Franklin outside their store re-arranging the window display of our studio’s plastic containers one midnight coming out of a late movie at the Angelika Film Center across Houston Street. In a beautiful high/low moment, the former Metro Pictures Gallery window looked like a supermarket shelf (well, almost). The window display was bursting with $2.25 plastic containers. It was one of the first of many of MOSS’ gutsy signature moves, the highbrow retailer championing cheap mass-produced design objects. For the record, the set of 8 Moss-curated Boym containers in a plastic bag cost $20.00, plus tax. There is a big price gap from $20 containers to a $20,000 sofa. For Murray Moss, the design quality could lie in all things, and he was eager to prove it to incredulous New York public.

MOSS, standard bearer extraordinaire, put their money where their mouth is. Despite what critics say, the MOSS perspective on design is not an elitist view. It’s only sincere and pure expression of a better life through design. And to guild the lily, they and their handpicked and trained staff lovingly organized many memorable exhibitions and parties. You can ask anyone in the design world who was there. I have been blessed to have been one of their designer/artist collaborators and friends for 16 years. I’d love to disclose many other memorable (design) controversies we survived together, but that history is still being written. There’s a bright future ahead for these boys starting the MOSS BUREAU.

Laurene Leon Boym

The Gift

On my recent trip to the south of India, I managed to get hold of a bicycle and pedaled through villages outside of Pondicherry, to a great excitement of local population. Children and youngsters, especially, seemed to be taken by a sight of a tourist on a bike with a camera. “Picture, picture!”– this cheerful and insisting call I would hear again and again. At first, I thought the villagers wanted to get paid a little for posing for the shot. This presumption proved wrong. Far from expecting the tip, they were sincerely surprised at the offering of money. Even though normally I am hesitant to take pictures of people, here I ended up with a small portrait gallery.

These encounters, so characteristic of India, are a curious phenomenon – like a souvenir in reverse. The Westerners always try to take something from a journey, to get a possession of something local for a good memory. Those Indian teens, on the contrary, wanted to give away, prompting me to capture their images to bring them home with me. I remember one group demanding to see their digital picture, and once they were certain I had it in my camera, they seemed greatly satisfied. They got their souvenir!

Here is this image from the world’s most photogenic country, the gift from a fishermen’s village, the name of which I do not even know. I’d like to share it with everyone.