A Cultural Space Ecology

Michael Seiwerath

Illustration by Randall Phillips

All we can eat—Seattle has a seemingly insatiable appetite for arts space. We always say we want more, and every area of the city has called out the arts as a priority in its neighborhood plan. But how do we ensure homes remain for the organizations and artists that are so desirable? How do we preserve the built environment ingredients for a vibrant cultural scene—the theaters, studios, galleries, social halls, live-work lofts and old buildings?

Seattle has a cultural space ecology that can work if all the elements come together. But market forces bring relentless pressure, favoring uses that can have a higher financial return.

In order to create more art spaces, we need an active, coordinated response driven by a cultural-space connector, be it government or another entity, that can facilitate necessary partnerships. The resources and political will are needed to create a program to connect property owners to artists, funders to organizations and halls of worship to performance artists. Will 2012 be the year Seattle finally perfects its roll?
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Common Questions For John Bielenberg

Interview By Brian Boram

COMMON is a collaborative brand and creative com-munity for accelerating social change. Founded in January 2011 by Alex and Ana Bogusky, John Bielenberg and Rob Schuham, COMMON supports, connects and celebrates those designing a new era of socially-minded enterprise. COMMON’s mission is to catalyze a global creative community with the tools, resources and opportunities to design positive social change, all done through the shared values of a collaborative brand. COMMON’s community and events are dedicated to shifting from talking about problems to actually engaging in new solutions.

In short, common wants to save the world with a new approach to capitalism and have fun doing it. If I didn’t know you better, I would surely question your motives. Who put you up to this?

Ha! For the last 20 years of my career in graphic design, I have been questioning the meaning and significance of my work with corporate clients. I’ve made some money and won some awards, but I never found enough personal satisfaction running a design business to warrant my investment of time and energy. So, in 2003 I started a program called Project M to try and inspire young designers to invest their careers in work that matters…whatever that means to them. What I’ve noticed during the last nine years is that some of the most successful Project M projects are actually social enterprises like PieLab, HERObike and Alabamboo.

In 2010 a friend introduced me to Alex Bogusky and Rob Schuham, and it triggered a harmonic convergence. They had very successful careers in advertising and marketing and were looking to change their approach. Together we came up with the idea of COMMON and started trying stuff out during 2011. From the beginning we believed that COMMON should have an element of fun. Because, well…why not!?

How does common complement your design practice?

It is in the service of solving bigger, gnarlier issues. Recently, we ran a session in Detroit funded by the Legacy Foundation, which was created in a billion dollar settlement against big Tobacco to promote anti-smoking. A session we called the Menth Lab was a weeklong workshop in Detroit to discuss the negative impacts of tobacco marketing on African American and Hispanic communities. Out of workshops like these come ideas, and ideas become design projects. We don’t start with design, but I do think design is an important part of making ideas come to life in the world. All of my work now is focused on driving positive change through enterprise. The graphic design is in support of that effort.

Global brands are more powerful than ever. the idea that brand value can be harnessed for a collective so- cial benefit is a great objective. What does the common brand stand for?

We’ve loosely based COMMON on some of the concepts presented in a book called The New Capitalist Manifesto by Umair Haque. We’re trying to embed some basic core values like transparency, sustainability, collaboration and community into for-profit ventures. Capitalism and corporations are the most powerful forces shaping our world, but the status quo of business now is totally unsustainable. All enterprise must become social enterprise if we are to have any hope of a positive future. It’s just “common” sense.

How does the common community fit into this new world order?

COMMON is a platform for people who want to channel their dissatisfaction and anger into action. These people can be both young activists (bottom up) and enlightened leaders within large organizations, institutions and corporations (top down).

It’s been a year since common launched. last august, common held its first “pitch” event. Now in 2012 you have events in NYC and Cape Town, South Africa. What has the response been?
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Toward a New Landscape Aesthetic

Kongjian Yu

The Red Ribbon (Tanghe River Park) uses minimal intervention to turn nature into aesthetically attractive, urban green space. Against the background of natural terrain and vegetation, the landscape architect placed a 500-meter, red-ribbon bench integrating lighting, seating, environmental interpretation and orientation.

“Little-Foot” Aesthetics

For almost a thousand years Chinese girls were forced to bind their feet so they could marry citified elites; their natural “big” feet were associated with provincial people and rustic life. At first, foot binding was the sole privilege of the high-class. The practice flourished until the collapse of the Qing Dynasty in 1911. Respected intellectuals wrote poems and created paintings praising artificial, tiny feet, while today they would be considered grotesque and abused. Painters portrayed classic Chinese beauties with small feet, flat breasts, tiny waists and white skin, which was in stark contrast to the strong and healthy peasant girls of the day. For a long time the beautiful have been viewed as necessarily unproductive and exempt from the “crude” survival-oriented processes of nature.

This definition of beauty and its connection with high-status urbanites is not unique to Chinese culture. Pre-Hispanic Mayan priests and nobles deformed their children’s bodies in a quest for social status. Their “beautiful” features – sloping foreheads, almond-shaped eyes, large noses, and drooping lower lips – today seem as grotesque as bound feet.

For thousands of years the urban elite worldwide have maintained the right to define beauty and good taste in their assertion of superiority and power. Bound feet and deformed heads are among thousands of cultural practices that served to elevate city sophisticates above rural bumpkins and reject nature’s inherent goals of health, survival and productivity; now landscaping and city building are the most visible and extensive instances of this tendency.

“Little-Foot Urbanism” is the art of gentrification and cosmetics. Its superficial nature replaces the messy, fertile and functional landscapes associated with healthy productive people. Today’s Little-Foot Urbanism landscapes, cities and buildings are like the “Little-Foot” girl: unhealthy, deformed, deprived of functionality and malodorous. Little-Foot Urbanism is a path to death.

Zhongshan Shipyard Park, where nature and an industrial heritage are integrated into a beautiful place.

The massive movement of populations from rural to urban areas is a recent phenomenon, and the aesthetics defined by the pre-20th century, privileged, urban minority are eagerly sought by the masses. These migrants are eager to bind their feet—to gentrify themselves physically and mentally. Contemporary Chinese environmental design reflects the aspiration to become sophisticated. In the current Chinese “City Beautiful Movement” (or “City Cosmetic Movement”), urban design, landscape design and architecture have lost their ways in a search for meaninglessly wild forms and exotic grandeur. This kind of work accelerates the degradation of the environment and is desperately unsustainable. We need a new aesthetics of big feet – beautiful, big feet – that will restore landscape architecture and urban design as an art of survival.

The Qinhuangdao Forest Park, at 576 acres, is a transformed working landscape demonstrating strategies to “gentrify” a rural landscape without sacrificing its functionality. By changing the landscape at critical positions and with minimum intervention, a monotonous, artificial windbreak forest with a decaying farm has been transformed into a lively urban park. A skywalk and boardwalk were built at the edge of the farm, allowing visitors to have close contact with the farm, and to observe the working landscape.

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China’s Evolving Public Art

Pam Beyette, Norie Sato

798 Contemporary Art District. Photo: Pam Beyette

In the Chinese golden month of October 2011, eight to nine months into the Arab Spring and with the fear of a potential Jasmine Spring, the Art + Design Delegation (of which I was a member) sponsored by the China Worker’s Center for International Exchange (CWCIE) traveled to Beijing and Shanghai to explore the implications of rapid and explosive change through the lens of the arts and environmental design. Ten days of nonstop meetings, visits to cultural touchstones, art districts and extraordinary food resulted in a rich context against which to discuss public art and its state in China and in the United States. Meetings with groups representing the China Artists’ Association, the Central Academy of Fine Arts and the Shanghai University Fine Art College involved vigorous discussions that challenged the capabilities of the delegation’s brilliantly skilled interpreter. Formalities were quickly dispensed and meetings typically ran beyond the scheduled one and one-half hours to three hours, with issues ranging from artist rights, copyright, ecological concerns, education programs, artist selection process, censorship and fabrication. Where interpretation became a roadblock, hand signs and laughter filled the gaps.

— Barbara Swift

The following are thoughts and observations about the state of public art in Beijing and Shanghai from Norie Sato and Pam Beyette, members of the Art + Design Delegation.

Public Work

The rate of infrastructure development in Beijing and Shanghai (and throughout China) is astronomical with tremendous new opportunities to integrate public art into light rail, public plazas, open spaces, streetscapes, city centers and waterfront development. The interest in and level of infrastructure development and investment in public art is enviable from our point of view but must be seen within the context of the culture and opening up.

Large architectural firms sometimes employ staff artists to design public art for their projects rather than engaging independent professional artists. While this method seems the closest to an integrated art model, there is little evidence of a collaborative-design team approach, with public artists as full partners, associated with infrastructure projects in China. Will these opportunities be structured to support a more visionary integration? To this, Wan Hongyi, the vice chief magazine editor of Public Art, a Shanghai University publication, believes that China’s elite cultural system limits the development of public art because public art is antielitist, anti-tradition and anti-class art. This new way of thinking about public art in China is promising.

Tianamen Square LCD Screens. Photo: Nori Sato

Education + Leadership

The government sponsored art academies and universities are powerful resources for public art with departments dedicated to the discipline; they also act as the primary pipelines for faculty and senior student public artists. The training in the academies is oriented toward mastering traditional sculptural formats, but in the public art program, architecture, urban design and landscape architecture are incorporated into the core education. An interdisciplinary way of working appears to be a fairly new concept, but as newer generations of artists come to the forefront, there will be a shift toward context driven, holistic and community-oriented artworks in Chinese public art.
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Zhang Defeng

Wear Bright Clothing Venus, cloisonné sculpture, 2000

Zhang Defeng is a working artist and educator in Beijing, China. He is an Associate Professor at the China Central Academy of Fine Arts Department of Sculpture, and is active in the Academy’s expansive public art program. The Academy is located 10 miles north of Tiananmen Square and is a hotbed for artists trained in the integration of fine arts, architecture and urban design. When founded in 1918 (as the National School of Fine Arts), it was the nation’s first school for fine arts and marked the beginning of modern Chinese arts education. Academy faculty and students drew international attention during the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests for their exploration of cultural symbolism, but censorship continues.

-Barbara Swift

Throne of the Thinkers, cloisonné sculpture, 2000 (detail: mirrored seat back)

Through a series of works titled A Good Place with Beautiful Mountains and Clear Water, I have interpreted my insights and understanding of the beauty in Eastern culture and expressed my love of life, nature and art. In 1999, I began using the cloisonné craft – which has a deep cultural and spiritual history in China – and traditional Chinese subjects to express cultural history but through a contemporary lens that reflects the spirit and issues of today.

I think that the most important pursuit of an artist should be more than ideas. It should include work that presents, actively and explicitly, an attitude toward nature and cultural traditions. This active and explicit attitude determines the contemporary value of the work, and as a result, contemporary art has a different kind of richness and vitality.

Inside the Garden of Summer, cloisonné sculpture, 2009

Patriot No.2000, cloisonné sculpture, 2001
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Bruce Mau Design

First written in 1998 by Bruce Mau, founder of award-winning, interdisciplinary design firm Bruce Mau Design, this manifesto articulates Mau’s beliefs, strategies and motivations. Fourteen years later there is still much here to inspire and energize the daily practice of any creative endeavor.

01 Allow events to change you.
You have to be willing to grow. Growth is different from something that happens to you. You produce it. You live it. The prerequisites for growth: the openness to experience events and the willingness to be changed by them.

02 Forget about good.
Good is a known quantity. Good is what we all agree on. Growth is not necessarily good. Growth is an exploration of unlit recesses that may or may not yield to our research. As long as you stick to good, you’ll never have real growth.

03 Process is more important than outcome.
When the outcome drives the process, we will only ever go to where we’ve already been. If process drives outcome we may not know where we’re going, but we will know we want to be there.

04 Love your experiments.
Joy is the engine of growth. Exploit the liberty in casting your work as beautiful experiments, iterations, attempts, trials and errors. Take the long view and allow yourself the fun of failure every day.

05 Go deep.
The deeper you go, the more likely you will discover something of value.
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Denis Hayes

The Living Building Challenge is a bold, new certification program that tests green buildings against the most rigorous performance standards in the world. A building cannot receive full certification until it has operated at demanding levels for at least one year. Much attention has been directed to the energy, water and materials criteria of the Challenge; these are objective characteristics that can be measured and counted. However, I want to focus on an equally critical part of the LBC test – “beauty” – and the central role it plays in green building design.

Form Follows Function

In 1896, Louis Sullivan, the architectural titan, was the first to write the words: “form…follows function.” Rather than follow precedent, or generate random graceful swoops, the form of a building, according to Sullivan, should flow organically from its purpose.

While that might seem self-evident – one would not want a cathedral that looked like a prison – this basic dictum was received as a bombshell at the time. And it started modern architecture down a curious path.

In 1908, the Austrian architect Adolf Loos took a further step, denouncing architectural ornamentation as “criminal.” The Bauhaus school, led by such giants as Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius and Mies van der Rohe, embraced this vision and sought to eliminate all superfluous grace notes from the built environment.

One branch of this modernist school ultimately produced housing developments so “soviet” in their utilitarianism that they evoke gulags. Today’s “big box” retail outlets – essentially featureless – are also part of this tradition.

A different modernist derivative led to exposed plumbing, heating ducts and structural elements (whose beauty had not previously been widely appreciated). Brightly painted plumbing is considered ornamental-but-not-superfluous. This approach reached its presumed zenith at the Pompidou Centre, a collaboration of Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano.

Trophy Buildings

Movements invariably produce counter-movements. Today’s most celebrated architectural prizes are frequently awarded to buildings that are nearly pure ornament. In these concoctions, form often bears no significant relationship to function. Like sculptors, star architects produce objects that bear their own unmistakable signatures. Shown photos of Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Bilbao, Marqués de Riscal and Disney Hall, the man on the street could easily guess that they are all by the same architect, but he would have no clue as to which is the museum, the hotel or the concert hall.
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