FYI, my friend Alexandra Ginsberg is showing her work done in collaboration with Oliver Froome-Lewis:
Touching the City is a design research unit that explores the ways in which we interact with the city. Observing the private life of small public spaces, we consider and exchange views on their potential and make proposals for their transformation.
This exhibition documents progress on our first project - the identification, interrogation and stimulation of benchspace and marks the launch of our web site, touchingthecity.com.
Louisiana this week-end, not the state, the museum, 35 km North of Copenhagen... to see MADE IN CHINA, the exhibit featuring among other Chinese artists, my favorite: Zhang Huan. Check his performance: Family Tree, 2000. The exhibit offers a glimpse of the questioning of globalization and Chinese identity... very insighful.
Anyway, I also wanted to share a picture I took. I spotted the pink towel, far away from the museum garden and ran down to the beach for a glimpse of pink against a gray sky:
Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of the Great American Cities (New York, Modern Library: 1993), page 65 of this re-edition:
Under the seeming disorder of the old city, wherever the old city is working successfully, is a marvelous order for maintaining the safety of the streets and the freedom of the city. It is a complex order. Its essence is intricacy of side-walk use, bringing with it a constant succession of eyes. This order is all composed of movement and change, and although it is life, not art, we may fancifully call it the art form of the city and liken it to the dance_not to a simple-minded precision dance with everyone kicking up at the same time, twirling in unison and bowing off en masse, but to an intricate ballet in which the individual dancers and ensembles all have distinctive parts which miraculously reinforce each other and compose an orderly whole. The ballet of the good city sidewalk never repeats itself from place to place, and in anyone place is always replete with new improvisations.
Isn’t Jane Jacobs’ writing succulent?
Now that the streets are stripped of live eyes, CCTVs take over, artificially attempting to maintain 'safety' without the freedom of the city. Surveillance. Needless to say that these ‘ubiquitous’ artificial eyes also augment the need for ‘storage’ spaces.
Thanks to D.K., I could put a name on the strange vehicle spoted in the streets of Copenhagen:
This is a Bubble car (a post WW2 production)! It immediately reminded me of the Cushicle by Archigram... (1966) and the Suitsalon (1967) (BTW, isn't Orta's Refuge Wear City Interventions 1993-1998 in the lineage of the Suitsalon? and Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, 1972, so related to Archigram? I like hypertexting :) This is to say that I am quite impressed by Archigram's sensibility toward their post WW2 everyday, and their subsequent mental assemblages.
