As a follow on to my exhibition Passages at Studio Sixty Six, gallery director Carrie Colton and I had a conversation with Canadian-Danish Mikael Colville-Andersen, urbanist, author and host of The Life-Sized City. We spoke about my work, about urbanism and urban transportation, as well as how cities are adapting to the challenges of the pandemic. You can find our conversation here.
The Life-Sized City
Mikael Colville-Andersen’s documentary series “The Life-Sized City” on TVO is an engaging, thought provoking and inspiring look at what makes cities good places to live. In the first two seasons, he visited Medellin, Toronto, Paris, Bangkok, Tel Aviv, Tokyo, Cape Town, Mexico City, Copenhagen, Milan, Detroit and Windsor, and Montreal.
“At the heart of every city is its citizens. Our perception of cities is slowly changing from a model of mathematical engineering to a human habitat where urban spaces have the potential to be healthy, attractive, interesting and efficient. In this six-part series, urban design expert Mikael Colville-Andersen explores the anatomy and vibrancy of the modern metropolis, highlighting pockets of life-sized goodness in cities around the world.” -TVO
I’ve had an abiding interest in urbanism. This series has resonated, inspired and informed my point of view.
A common thread throughout is that community focused, engaged people know what their neighbourhoods need and they can cut through to an effective way of making their ideas a reality. A blend of idealism and pragmatism, with a big measure of persistence, gets it done.
I had seen both seasons of this series when they first aired, a year or two before spending a month in Montreal in October 2019 for a self-directed residency. While I had been to the city many times before, the luxury of being there for a month allowed me to live and breathe much of what Colville-Andersen talks about in the episode. I recently re-watched the Montreal episode, in the context of my current Studio Sixty Six exhibition Passages, which came out of this residency. I found it poignant to watch this episode given that the city, as everywhere in the world, is still in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. Because of the pandemic, I have not been there in five months and am not sure when I will next be back. I’m feeling nostalgic.
"This is a city that stands firmly on the shoulders of its citizens, who hail from every corner of the world. They define it, not the other way around. Montreal is raw, edgy, irreverent, creative, dynamic, resilient. And on top of that, this is one of the coolest, most chill places I could ever imagine. Montreal. Montréal. Call it whatever you want. I really don't think it cares. This underdog city is just happy that you want to be here. And that's why I keep coming back."
A new season is scheduled for streaming and to air on TVO September 2020 - can’t wait.
Links
Mikael Colville-Andersen
The Life-Sized City vs The Cult of Big
Copenhagenize, founded by Mikael Colville-Andersen
Montreal’s bike lanes expansion during pandemic
Post-pandemic city
In How to Design a Post-Pandemic City on the Bloomberg CityLab blog, Alex Wittenberg writes: “…there’s a broad need to reimagine public space and devise socially distanced ways to navigate the urban landscape over a longer term…outdoor space will need to work even harder — hosting stores, performances, and all manner of public services.
A new effort focused on Baltimore is offering a set of solutions to public space challenges during the pandemic. The “Design for Distancing Ideas Guidebook” — a free document from the city of Baltimore, the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, the Baltimore Development Corporation, and the city’s nonprofit Neighborhood Design Center — collects 10 plans for creating temporary, low-cost spaces that permit physically distant social interaction in urban environments such as streets, alleys, vacant land and parking lots. The selected concepts were drawn from a pool of 162 submissions from architecture and design firms; the plans were conceived around the needs of Baltimore’s neighborhoods, but could be adapted to cities anywhere.”
“These aren’t just design exercises: The winning interventions, which should cost between $5,000 and $100,000 each to construct, are set to be installed in 17 neighborhoods across Baltimore, supported by a $1.5 million investment from the city during the second phase of the project. The hope, project leaders say, is that they can also help channel resources into priority districts in low-income communities. Most of the 17 neighborhoods selected, Goold said, are in neighborhoods in East and West Baltimore that have suffered from chronic disinvestment. These aren’t gentrified districts that are currently full of restaurants and retailers: Oldtown, for example, has one of the highest vacant-lot densities among Baltimore’s neighborhoods; it’s now home to a long-vacant pedestrian mall.”
“This guidebook talks about how we can have principles that prioritize communities of color and communities that have been disinvested,” Pollack Porter said. “It is a tremendous opportunity to center equity and public health in how we rethink public spaces.”
In Ottawa, Queen Elizabeth Drive, from Laurier Ave. to Fifth Ave., has been closed to motor vehicles from 8am to 8pm daily since April 27, 2020. What started as a pilot project has been extended to September 7, 2020. National Capital Commission: “This closure provides residents the opportunity to get outdoors to exercise and get some fresh air, while practising safe physical distancing.” It is used and enjoyed by many everyday. -photo and caption by MaryAnn Camps
Redesigning our city streets
A how-to guide to redesign city streets during and after COVID by Nicholas Sanderson is a bang on, timely read from beginning:
“In cities the world over, streets are being repurposed for people walking, cycling, and simply spending time outside. First Milan, Bogota, then Oakland, Lima, Paris, New York, London. The list goes on. From east to west, Canadian cities are setting out similar plans. So how should cities start to re-plan their streets? Here is a four-step guide for our cities.”
To end:
“Our streets are one of the most valuable and malleable assets that cities own right now — doing nothing will perpetuate, if not worsen, the existing inequalities the pandemic has brutally exposed. Changing our streets might just help us recover to a more liveable city on the other side of the lock down.
Canadian cities now need to seriously think the role of their streets and the place for vehicle traffic within them. The nimblest and most visionary ones will be the short- and long-term success stories.”
15-minute cities
How the ‘15-Minute City’ Could Help Post-Pandemic Recovery by Alex Wittenberg is a timely and compelling read from Bloomberg CityLab. Some key passages:
“The newly released Mayors’ Agenda for a Green and Just Recovery, released July 15 by C40 Cities, an international coalition of urban leaders focused on fighting climate change and promoting sustainable development, was developed by the organization’s Global Mayors COVID-19 Recovery Task Force…One core idea: Cities are the “engines of the recovery,” and investing in their resilience is the best way to avoid economic disaster.
One of its recommendations has a more novel ring to it. The agenda recommends that “all residents will live in ‘15-minute cities.’” That term echoes the transformative ambitions of Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo, who has doubled down on car-free transit and pedestrian infrastructure in the French capital. Hidalgo made the idea that Parisians should be able to meet their shopping, work, recreational and cultural needs within a 15-minute walk or bike ride a centerpiece of her recent reelection campaign. The C40 proposal suggests that following such a model would help global cities live up to the document’s promise of equitable access to jobs and city services for all, and rebuild areas economically hard-hit by the pandemic.
It’s not a new idea: Inspired in part by urbanist Jane Jacobs’s philosophy that proximity makes cities vital, various planning philosophies, including New Urbanism, have promoted more dense, walkable development — and simply “putting things closer together” — for decades. But the C40’s embrace of the 15-minute city concept may be the most concise and catchy way to repackage the idea as a pandemic economic recovery tool.”
“It’s Paris, however, that’s been the poster child for this shift: The French capital swiftly moved to install a regime of “corona cycleways” to ease transit crowding and prevent traffic from surging back into the city as businesses reopened. Recent images from the city show an almost Copenhagen-like renaissance of urban bicycling.
Adding this kind of infrastructure isn’t just about allowing people to be outside safely, says Montreal mayor Valérie Plante, whose city plans to add roughly 300 kilometers (186 miles) of temporary cycling and pedestrian paths this summer: It also supports local business. “We want to encourage people to buy local, and forget Amazon,” she said at a July 15 press conference.”
“…while resource shortages will be extreme, starting small can yield big changes, especially when framed as part of a larger stimulus plan. The speed at which pedestrian, biking, and scooter infrastructure has been ramped up during the pandemic shows how quickly things can change. Small tweaks to zoning or permitting for sidewalk cafes and cycling infrastructure can build momentum for larger shifts when budgets return.”
“A crisis does have a way of revealing what’s already broken,” Bosacker says. “If cities aren’t using the revealing nature of this pandemic, how it’s highlighting disparities and racial inequities, shame on them. As difficult as it’s going to be, it’s a real opportunity.”
Related:
CBC Ottawa’s reporting last summer of Ottawa’s plan for the 15-minute neighbourhood:
Welcome to the 15-minute neighbourhood: Intensification key to city's official plan
“Ottawa's revised official plan aims to create a community of "15-minute neighbourhoods" that will transform the capital into North America's most liveable mid-sized city while planning for a population that will eventually double or even triple.”
“We can't continue to have our city be entirely people coming from far-flung suburbs downtown to work, and then back again.” - Coun. Jeff Leiper
Welcome to your world
I spent October 2019 in Montreal on a self-directed residency. I went with the question: how does the built environment affect how we think, feel and behave? I wanted to explore the idea that cities and people are systems that continually interact with each other. It was a stimulating month of walking, looking, absorbing, reflecting and taking photos. However, back in my studio in Ottawa, I found I was not seeing in my images what I had felt and perceived in Montreal.
I then came upon Sarah Williams Goldhagen’s book: Welcome to Your World, How the Built Environment Shapes Our Lives. ‘I began coming across scattered writings - in social theory, cognitive linguistics, various branches of psychology, and cognitive neuroscience - that intimated a new account of how people actually perceive, think about, and ultimately experience their environments, which of course includes the built world...a newly developing paradigm, variously called “embodied” or “grounded” or “situated” cognition, was emerging from the confluence of work in many disciplines, some of them in the sciences. This paradigm holds that much of what and how people think is a function of our living in the kinds of bodies we do. It reveals that most - much more than we previously knew - of human thought is neither logical nor linear, but associative and nonconscious. This still-emerging paradigm provides the foundation for a model and analysis of how we live simultaneously in this world, inside our own bodies with our feet on the ground; with other people; and in the worlds inside our heads, which are rife with simulations of the worlds we continuously imagine and reshape for ourselves. Human cognition, decision-making, and action are some admixture of all three.’
These ideas resonated with me and illuminated the series, Passages, that came out of the residency. This book is compelling, important - and highly readable.
Some favourite passages from the book:
“We respond to our environments not only visually but with our many sensory faculties - hearing, and smelling, and especially touching, and more - working in concert with one another. These surroundings affect us much more viscerally and profoundly that we could possibly be aware of, because most of our cognitions, including those about where we are, happen outside our conscious awareness. ...when we navigate and inhabit our environments, what and how we consciously think is inexorably bound up with our nonconscious simulations and cognitions, and with what and how we feel. Most surprisingly, our emotions, our imagined bodily actions, and especially the memories that we develop of them are embedded in our very experiences of built environments, and loom large in how we form our identities.”
“What the new paradigm of embodied or situated cognition reveals is that the built environment and its design matters far, far more than anybody, even architects, even thought that it did…..It holds a mirror up to show the worlds that we have made and clearly illustrates ways to remake our worlds to be less soul-deadening and more enlivening to human bodies and minds, communities, and polities.”
“Emphasizing how design shapes everyday experience, [Winston] Churchill declared that ‘we shape our buildings, thereafter they shape us.’”
“...contrary to what had been assumed for centuries, we now know that all our lives, our minds are changing and quite literally being shaped by our experiences in the physical environments in which we live.”
“...it turns out that, more often than not, it takes just as many resources to build a bad building - or landscape or townscape - as a good one.”
“In the wake of the cognitive revolution, we must recognize the reality that aesthetic experience, including our aesthetic experience of the built environment, concerns more than pleasure, so much more that the conventional distinction between architecture as the province of the elite, and building as the province of the masses, must once and for all be eradicated. From our perspective - the perspective of how human beings experience spaces, of how built environments affect our well being - such a distinction is incomprehensible and pernicious. The more we learn about how people actually experience the environments in which they live their lives, the more obvious it becomes that a well-designed built environment falls not on a continuum stretching from high art to vernacular building, but on a very different sort of continuum: somewhere between a crucial need and a basic human right.”
Links:
This is Your Brain on Architecture
Assessing Architecture Through Neuroscience and Psychology
Hanran: 20th-Century Japanese Photography
While, like so many others, I miss my regular visits to the National Gallery of Canada and eagerly anticipate its re-opening mid-July, I have been re-exploring online this excellent Japanese photography exhibit from this past fall/winter. I visited the exhibition several times while it was on, and was particularly fascinated and moved by the work of Ishiuchi Miyako (see images below), Nakahira Takuma and Kanemura Osamu.
‘Witness a period of socio-political upheaval in 20th-century Japan, through photographs from the Yokohama Museum of Art. Inspired by the Japanese word for flooding, overflow, or deluge, Hanran reflects 20th-century Japan, from the early 1930s to the 1990s, through the lenses of 28 significant photographers. See this unforgettable exhibition, on view for the first time outside Japan, which calls attention to the costs of nuclear warfare and Japan’s extraordinary recovery – all unfolding in front of the camera's mechanical eye.’ -NGC website. More
Read more:
Long Exposure: Conversation with exhibition curator Eriko Kimura
Japan in the Shōwa Era: Looking Forward and Back
Depth of Field: A Japanese Photography Reading List
Images by Ishiuchi Miyako
In Praise of Shadows
In Praise of Shadows, by novelist Jun'ichirō Tanizaki, was first published in Japan in 1933.
I enjoyed this meandering essay on Japanese aesthetics, on light and shadow, looking at architecture, electric lighting, tableware, food, theatre and more. Evocative descriptions and resonating ideas from another time and place.
Some favourite passages:
‘Such is our way of thinking - we find beauty not in the thing itself but in the pattern of shadows, the light and the darkness, that one thing against another creates.’
‘And so it has come to be that the beauty of a Japanese room depends on a variation of shadows, heavy shadows against light shadows - it has nothing else. Westerners are amazed at the simplicity of Japanese rooms, perceiving in them no more than ashes walls bereft of ornament. Their reaction is understandable, but it betrays a failure to comprehend the mystery of shadows.’
‘We do not dislike everything that shines, but we do prefer a pensive luster to a shallow brilliance, a murky light that, whether in a stone or an artifact, bespeaks a sheen of antiquity.
Of course this “sheen of antiquity” of which we hear so much is in fact the glow of grime….Westerners attempt to expose every speck of grime and eradicate it, while we Orientals carefully preserve and even idealize it. Yet for better or for worse we do love things that bear the marks of grime, soot, and weather, and we love the colors and the sheen that call to mind the past that made them. Living in these old houses among these old objects is in some mysterious way a source of peace and repose.’
‘The Westerner uses silver and steel and nickel tableware, and polishes it to a fine brilliance, but we object to the practice. While we do sometimes indeed use silver for teakettles, decanters, or sake cups, we prefer not to polish it. On the contrary, we begin to enjoy it only when the luster has worn off, when it has begun to take on a dark, smoky patina.’
‘So benumbed are we nowadays by electric lights that we have become utterly insensitive to the evils of excessive illumination.’
Read Maria Popova’s thoughtful exploration of the essay in this edition of Brain Pickings
The ‘In-Between’
I recently read: ‘Life Is What Happens In-Between: For More and More Americans, Stability Exists Mostly in Memory’ by essayist and cartoonist Tim Kreider. So much resonates and it is simply a great read. Here are some highlights.
“My friend Robin grew up in an army family, and learned early on that she wasn’t going to live anywhere or know anyone for very long, that houses and schools and best friends were strictly provisional, temporary. Kids like me, with stabler lives, grew up secure in the delusion, fuzzy and comforting as a favorite blanket, that our homes and friends were givens, fixed forever. But, as Robin points out, transience wasn’t just a peculiarity of her own upbringing; it turns out to be the reality of life, for all of us. Everything is contingent, ephemeral; the flimsy little Potemkin villages of permanence and security we rig up for ourselves — real estate, possessions, tenure and retirement plans, circles of friends and long-term relationships — are easily demolished by layoffs, divorce, accidents, and diagnoses, or by non-metaphorical floods and hurricanes.”
“Even those periods we look back on as idylls of stability exist mostly in retrospect: when we’re in the middle of them they feel as blind and confusing as any other interval of our lives. “
“…my friend Harold and I were driving south on I-95 over the Susquehanna River, on our way down to Baltimore. Harold was in between, too, though he had not enough going on in his life, whereas I had too much. It had been a misty morning, but most of the moisture had burned off by then except for a dense fog bank that followed the contours of the river. As we drove out onto the bridge it was like flying into a cloud; we were completely enveloped in dewy gray blankness. Out in the middle of the bridge we could see neither the bank behind us nor the one ahead, only the bridge itself, a road stretched across nothingness, vanishing into obscurity in both directions. Up ahead of us a tattered banner of clarity was streaming out from the bridge’s edge where the mist split and furled around it. The Replacements were playing — “Alex Chilton,” which might, after all, be my favorite song in the world. We couldn’t see where we’d come from or where we were going but I was in the car with my best friend listening to a song we both loved and, inside that moment, everything was all right.“
Thanks to writer and artist Austin Kleon for this - check out his website and subscribe to his newsletter, always good stuff there.
Papier 2019
In late April, I was in Montreal to see Papier 2019, a contemporary fair with a large focus on works on paper. While there was a vast range of excellent work, I was drawn to the more intimate mostly black and white work. Here are some favourites, and links to the artists’ websites: Janie Julien-Fort, Jim Verburg, Luce Meunier, Chris Cran, Marla Hlady.
Karim Rashid (1)
I recently attended Karim Rashid’s ‘Analog Versus Digital’, a talk given by the industrial designer in connection with his retrospective show ‘Cultural Shaping’ at the Ottawa Art Gallery. A captivating speaker, he spoke for 90 minutes, without notes. Images of his work were projected continually on the huge screen behind him, as he walked and talked. 90 minutes, no repeated images. Based in New York, he is currently involved in projects in 42 countries. It boggles the mind. Karim was compelling, informative, expansive, inspiring. And funny. I admire the simplicity and elegance of his work, the organic forms, and the sense of fun. Below are some of the furniture designs that stood out for me. I highly recommend this wide ranging exhibition, which runs until February 10, 2019.
"The role of a designer today is to make the world a better place. By replacing the clutter of poorly designed objects with beautiful, high performing ones that are hopefully sustainable, ergonomic, and sensible yet seductive, we reduce the stress in our environments." — Karim Rashid
Karim Rashid (2)
In addition to Karim Rashid’s iconic object, furniture and footwear designs at his ‘Cultural Shaping’ retrospective at the Ottawa Art Gallery, I am enchanted by ‘Facet’, printed lenticular lens, 2012
The Kajitsu Playlist
Ryuichi Sakamoto (Nathan Bajar for The New York Times)
In heavy rotation in my studio, this is an excellent 3+ hour playlist by musician Ryuichi Sakamoto – contemplative, spacious, introspective, varied.
Here's the Spotify link: The Kajitsu Playlist
It comes with an interesting back story, here’s the full article by Ben Ratliff, New York Times.
"Annoyed by Restaurant Playlists, a Master Musician Made His Own"
Thanks to writer and artist Austin Kleon for this - check out his website and subscribe to his newsletter, always good stuff there.
Thoughts on images
In ‘Where I Be Is with the Image’ (Canadian Art, Summer 2018), Nasrin Himada talks about her interest “in thinking with images as a way out of the limits of language.” While the focus of the article is on the experience of exile, I find what Himada has to say about images resonant and worth thinking about more broadly. Himada also quotes a 2014 interview with Etel Adnan by Lisa Robertson in BOMB Magazine. Both articles are good reads, here are some ideas that especially resonated with me:
“Images are not still. They are moving things. They come, they go, they disappear, they approach, they recede, and they are not even visual—ultimately, they are pure feeling. They’re like something that calls you through a fog or a cloud.” Etal Adnan
“If images are calling us through a fog or a cloud, it’s because at times they get at the limit of something before we can even speak it or write it. Instead they allow us to feel it.” Nasrin Himada
“Light is an extraordinary element. It’s a being on its own, it’s something you look at, and that also you inhabit.” Etal Adnan
“Art is not separate or alienated from how we live through the day—rather, it saturates the experience of what makes the day a day.” Nasrin Himada
Vhils
A serendipitous walk in Montreal's Rosemont La Petite Patrie neighbourhood recently introduced me to the work of Portuguese artist Vhils (Alexandre Farto). The striking mural on the corner of Avenue de Chateaubriand and Rue Belanger shows Vhils' bas-relief carving technique, which makes the work part of the wall, and the wall integral to the work. I highly recommend a good look at Vhils' work on his website, starting with this excellent video from his recent 'Fragment Urbains/Decombres' exhibition at Galerie Danysz, Paris. Wish I had been in Paris to see it.
Free play
I recently read 'Free Play - Improvisation in Life and Art' by Stephen Matchnanovitch, an improvisational violinist, author, computer artist and educator. Published in 1991, it's not a new book, but the right book at the right time for me. Much resonated. Two of many sections highlighted: "One of the many catch-22s in the business of creativity is that you can't express inspiration without skill, but if you are too wrapped up in the professionalism of skill you obviate the surrender to accident that is essential to inspiration. You begin to emphasize product at the expense of process." And on patience with one's work and process: "If we operate with a belief in long sweeps of time, we build cathedrals; if we operate from fiscal quarter to fiscal quarter, we build ugly shopping malls."
Bonobo
In heavy rotation: Bonobo's Sweetness. I didn't know this album when it first came out way back in 2002. But I'm listening to it a lot right now. Highly recommend it.
Stress test
When I began working this year with matte duralar, a translucent plastic film, I wanted to embrace the material, to let it move and breathe, be immediate -- and not mount it under glass.
I am working with laser image transfers to the duralar using acrylic medium. There is likely a chemical bond between the plastic particles in the laser toner and the acrylic medium, and between the acrylic medium and the duralar.
To be sure the combined material and process are robust and stable, I stress tested the work. I took a discarded piece, applied two thinned coats of fluid matte medium, then once dry cut it into two pieces. One piece stayed inside as the control and the other spent over a week outside in very hot, intense sun as well as some full days in the rain. The result? The two pieces match up and look exactly the same: no stretching, fading or chipping.
I have mounted the work in white shadow boxes with no glass. The duralar pieces are hung by white ring nails 1/4" away from the back of the boxes so they float in their frames. See In Transit and Between.
