Metropolis’ Susan Szenasy Presents Metropolis LIVE! In conversation with Frances Bronet
Szenasy, appointed Publisher of Metropolis, engaged in a series of national conversations during the spring of 2014 exploring issues of design advocacy and ethics while celebrating the release of Szenasy, Design Advocate – a collection of writings and talks from the past 30 years. Szenasy participated in a conversation with UO School of Architecture and Allied Arts Dean Frances Bronet, in Portland on May 22, 2014 at the University of Oregon in Portland.
The event was live broadcast to an audience at the UO campus in Eugene (177 Lawrence Hall). Szenasy was available for book signing after the talk. Key phrases and ideas from the conversation between Szenasy and Bronet were live tweeted by @johnhenrytweets.
At work tweeting broadsides made in real time. @johnhenrytweets with @tschlapp at Metropolis LIVE! With Susan Szenasy.
The following is the press release issued by Metropolis magazine to announce Szenasy’s new post and her book launch.
This April 2014, Metropolis magazine announced the appointment of Susan S. Szenasy as publisher of the magazine, sharing a dual role with her long-standing position as editor-in-chief. The appointment, made by the founder, Horace Havemeyer III, one month prior to his passing from complications associated with CIDP, a chronic neurological disorder, sets in motion a new chapter in the life of this celebrated magazine of architecture, culture and design.
Concurrent to this appointment is the release of Szenasy, Design Advocate, a collection of writings and talks from the past 30 years, released by Metropolis Books and distributed by ARTBOOK | D.A.P. This volume – the first published collection of Szenasy’s writings – brings together editorials, reviews, stories, profiles, industry event presentations, classroom lectures, commencement addresses and more.
Szenasy’s honest, thought-provoking and often-challenging opinions are present in all of these pieces. So, too, is her ongoing commitment to informed dialogue, which has influenced and guided generations of design professionals, architects, journalists, retailers, manufacturers, legislators, educators and the next generation of designers.
Through this collection of writings, the organic development of a social activist is revealed. Szenasy’s capacity to anchor her inquisitive nature and her reflective reasoning in a foundational belief in human and civil right established her as a pioneer in the advocacy of sustainable design.
In celebration of the launch of the book and her recent appointment, Szenasy has embarked on a series of national conversations exploring issues of design advocacy and ethics. From New York to Los Angeles, Boston to Grand Rapids, Atlanta to Chicago, Providence to Seattle and cities in between Szenasy will be engaging with members of the design community to gain a broad understanding of the issues and topics pertinent to the built environment and design in today’s culture.
According to Szenasy, “Metropolis offers us the freedom to really explore design, culture, talent, people, creativity, materials, policy, everything. It really is a conversation. And when I am on the road engaging with the design community, I don’t give talks anymore. It’s a two-way conversation. A dialogue.”Susan’s active involvement with all of the design community has become legendary. Her tough, but constructive criticism has created an indispensible dialogue in an industry that, like every other area of society, is redefining itself to meet the needs of growing populations in our tech-rich, environmentally compromised, global-local world.
“The two of us were in agreement about our vision for Metropolis” stated Horace Havemeyer III in his announcement of Szenasy to publisher. “From the beginning, we have felt that architecture and design are essential to a humane and progressive society. We have championed, when no one else did, the design community’s obligation to serve all of society’s needs, not just the upper two percent. And now, the growing interest in socially and environmentally relevant design–by a new generation of young professionals – is just one more validation of our long-held vision.”
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Metropolis, founded in 1981, Metropolis, the magazine of architecture, culture and design, has earned itself a reputation as a publication of distinction. It has led the conversation on sustainability, technology and accessibility as these issues relate to and reshape the built environment. Long considered a significant voice in the fields of architecture, interior design, graphic design, product design, urban planning and historic preservation, the magazine and its electronic content is recognized as being in the vanguard of the discourse of architecture and design to a dedicated following.
Susan S. Szenasy is publisher/editor in chief of Metropolis, the award-winning New York City–based magazine of architecture, design and culture. Since 1986, she has led the magazine in landmark design journalism, achieving international recognition. A respected authority on sustainability and design, she served two terms on the boards of the Council for Interior Design Accreditation and the Landscape Architecture Foundation, the FIT Interior Design board, and the NYC Center for Architecture Advisory Board.
She has received two IIDA Presidential Commendations, is an honorary member of the ASLA and AIA NYC, and the 2008 recipient of the ASID Patron’s Prize and Presidential Commendation. Along with Metropolis magazine founding publisher Horace Havemeyer III, Szenasy received the 2007 Civitas August Heckscher Award for Community Service and Excellence. She holds an MA from Rutgers University and honorary doctorates from the Art Center College of Design, Kendall College of Art and Design, the New York School of Interior Design, and the Pacific Northwest College of Art.
The Digital Arts program in Portland at the School of Architecture and Allied Arts is a unique option for students who elect to spend a fifth year refining the genre and their BFA work. The program gives students an opportunity to connect to the thriving arts scene in Oregon’s largest and most cosmopolitan metropolis and sets the stage for continued connections, exposure, and integration into an arts and culture environment with a global reputation.
Each term, the program invites a faculty member from Eugene or a guest instructor based in Portland to conduct the Portland group of students with a specific curriculum encompassing study and instruction, experience and lecture. For winter 2014, Rick Silva joined the Portland faculty and enlightened the students through a term’s worth of artistic endeavor.
In the world of digital art, Silva holds a place that is new and vividly ground-breaking. He is internationally lauded for his work with the computer screen, his gifs and phenomenal 3-D animations—work that leaves the viewer clamoring for more in a thirsty visually captivating and compelling way. To view Silva’s work is really to have both your intelligence and your cerebral capacity simultaneously provoked. A glance will never do. His work commands a deep, lingering stare—what you see, is not necessarily what you get as images morph, change and play with stills given electronic life by imposed motion and the brilliance of metronome-like regulated repetition. It is a fantastic world Silva creates and it is only by viewing some of his work, that you will get an idea of what was meant when he was called “a recognized pioneer in new Media Art.”
I had an opportunity to interview Silva this winter and he was good enough to provide responses to questions via email. What follows are his responses to a few select questions about his time in Portland and the experience teaching in the Digital Arts program here.
Here is a quick bio to provide some background context:
Rick Silva’s animations, videos, websites, performances, and video games explore landscape, remix and glitch. In his recent project enpleinair.org he is taking his laptop into the wild and creating 3D animations in response to the immediate terrain and elements.
Silva’s art has shown in exhibitions and festivals worldwide, including Transmediale (Germany), Futuresonic (U.K.), and Sonar (Spain). His research has been supported through grants and commissions from places such as Rhizome and The Whitney Museum of American Art. He has performed live multimedia works in London at E:VENT Gallery, Tokyo at The Machida City Museum of Graphic Arts, and throughout North America including the Software Cinema Festival in Houston Texas. Media outlets such as The New York Times, The Guardian, The Huffington Post, and the CBS Evening News have all featured his art. Recently, the author of the bookTransmission Arts: Artists and Airwaves regarded him as “a recognized pioneer in New Media Art.”
Silva received his MFA from the University of Colorado in 2007. He has previously taught at the University of Georgia and the Alberta College of Art + Design. [Source]
SP: How has teaching the Digital Arts program this term effected your work?
RS: One of the two classes I’m teaching this term is a Web Art class. Web Art, or Internet Art, is a scene I’ve been active in for about a decade now. I often teach Internet Art as a small section in other digital art studio classes, but I haven’t had the chance to plan an entire course around it. Student’s lives are often so intertwined with the internet, but very few knew about how artists have used the web as a medium in the last 20 years.
It was a great opportunity to rewind to early 90s Internet Art, to touch on some of today’s varied approaches, and to share some of my own history in the scene as well. Thinking about that class, and the history of Web Art, is working itself into some of my new projects that are web based.
SP: Please comment on working in Portland and with the students in the Portland program…what opportunities are here for them?
RS: The 5th year Portland BFA option is a really unique opportunity for our UO Digital Art undergrads, and it has been good for me to experience it first hand as a professor here this term.
Students have close access to the whole Portland art, music, film, and design communities. They get a whole school year to work intensely on their creative practice, and to get weekly, even daily, feedback on their work from their peers, faculty, and community.
Students also have access to some cutting edge equipment like Formlab printers, Oculus Rifts, sound booths, laser cutters, and more. Having a big final show at The White Box gallery [space] is an awesome opportunity as well.
Rick Silva on far left with a student in the Digital Arts Program in Portland | Photo by Dave Braithwaite
SP: How have the reviews with the Portland community reviewers contributed to the students’ practice and development of their work and ideas?
RS: They become important markers of progress for the students as the year unfolds. The reviews make the students accountable to an audience outside of our classroom.
SP: You have had an exhibition open during this term at the PSU Anzen gallery: was that recent work? And was it influenced at all by your being in Portland? Has Portland contributed at all to your professional practice? Are there opportunities here that you have been impressed with or have contributed to your work?
RS: Yes, that was recent work. The exhibition at PSU was done in collaboration with an artist run space I’m a member of called Ditch Projects. When Ditch Projects has a members show we don’t usually credit each person’s work, so often each of us takes the opportunity to step outside our styles and try something new.
My work is often situated outdoors, and I hardly ever work with text in my videos, so I used this exhibition opportunity to make a 3D animation that has a a very white gallery scene with rotating white pedestals, and digitally spray painted text that spins around and reveals itself on a loop once a minute.
This work was not really influenced by Portland, more just the parameters and theme of the exhibition. I do often think about place or displacement in my art, and sometimes that comes after I’ve lived or visited somewhere, I’m sure something Portland-esque will find its way into a future project.
SP: What have been some of the highlights of the term in your program for this group of students?
RS: One highlight was an assignment I gave in the Web Art class, where students were asked to create real world objects influenced by internet technology or culture. One student created physical “pop ups” and put them on all the other student’s projects. It was interesting how as we walked around and talked about all the projects one by one, and everyone just ignored the added “pop ups,” exactly how we ignore ads on the internet in real life.
SP: Who have you brought in as guest artists or speakers?
RS: This term we’ve had Jeremy Rotsztain, a local digital artist that focuses on touch interface / software art. Jordan Tate,an artist and professor from Cincinnati. And Krystal South, a Portland artist/writer/designer.
SP: Have you done anything specific to being in Portland—taking or talking to the students about what is here and how they can integrate or be involved with the artistic community?
RS: Yes, on my course calendars I list as many Portland art/design happenings that I can find, and urge them to engage with the local scene.
In discussions, I bring up a lot of Portland artists, designers, galleries, and institutions as examples. It’s great to point to art that is happening in the city right this moment, for example the PSU Ditch Projects show, or the 2014 Portland Biennial.
SP: Any comments you can add about your work (current) directions you are going in, influences you have in your work, or new ideas you are exploring?
RS: I’ve been thinking a lot about bird migration patterns this term. I saw this link from a Portland news station the other day that really resonated with me. It talks about these migrating birds that are being digitally mapped by weather radars during the night.
I’m thinking that will for sure end up in a new project somehow.
Rick Silva on far left with students in the Digital Arts Program in Portland | Photo by Dave Braithwaite
Thank you, Rick Silva!
Many thanks to student Dave Braithwaite for the images used in this post.
In the winter of 2013, students in Philip Speranza’s Place Branding for Public Services studio collectively made a single, full-scale urban installation fabricated entirely by 4 x 4 boards. The students’ finished work was presented to Portland’s Regional Arts and Culture Council and the proposal made that it be deployed in local parks as an object that would inspire “an urban intervention and evoke a conversation of the values of a city….that are based on the very compassion for one’s fellow citizen.” Under Speranza’s direction, the studio investigated Bruno Latour’s idea of “attachment” as a way to connect a work to the live human context of a site over time.
The students involved in this project
Jesse Alvizar, Natalie Cregar, Vijayeta Davda, Sermin Yesilada, Tina Wong, Grace Aaraj, Charley Danner,Wilfredo Sanchez, Srivarshini Balaji, Timothy Niou, Oliver Brandt, Hanna Lirman, Haley Blanco, Jenna Pairolero, Eli Rosenwasser and Henry Smith
The entire installation lay dormant for several months housed in the UO in Portland’s Under the Bridge Space while Speranza worked tirelessly to obtain permits, and permissions. On November 2, the piece, titled simply, Bridging successfully made its way into the public eye when a small group of students, along with Speranza, loaded up the boards on a rainy afternoon and re-constructed the piece on the damp grass of the North Park Blocks between Davis and Everett streets, firmly nestled in the greenway that unites the Pearl District and Old Town | Chinatown in Northwest Portland.
Architecturally-inspired and artistically-conceived, Bridging is a relatively approachable piece built entirely of 4 x 4 cedar boards that form a block-like structure about 4’ high and 9’ long and 2’ wide. Boards 4’ in length slide in and out of the block to project from either side forming both places to sit and places that are desk or table-like….places to sit near a companion or places to be next to a stranger. This human-scaled structure was conceived of by the sixteen architecture students named above (all from the School of Architecture and Allied Arts, University of Oregon in Portland at the White Stag Block) who designed and built Bridging during the winter term 2013. The students had investigated ideas of place branding and public service in Portland, Oregon and Barcelona, Catalunya. Diagramming and parametric design methods led to the use of traditional and digital fabrication techniques in the White Stag Block Fab Lab and Woodshop with John Leahy. Studio reviews conducted during the winter of 2013 term provided invaluable input from members of the Creative Corridor including partners and collaborators, Kristin Calhoun of the Regional Arts and Culture Council, wood crafts person and designer Richard Nelson, Corey Schreiber of UI Culinary Institute, Bob Hastings of Trimet, artist Tad Savinar, Brian Ferschweiler of Blanchet House, faculty from the University of Oregon and other members of the Portland community. The project came together with a strong sensitivity for the importance of community and keeping the audience (the people of the area) a crucial part of the partnership and involved in the process of imagining where and how Bridging would be integrated into the community.
Goethe wrote that architecture is “frozen music,” and Bridging is its own diminutive arabesque. The piece is small and forte enough to make one wonder if it is meant to be climbed upon or simply observed; the pixel-like translation of the 4 x 4’s creates a rhythmic and tantalizingly predictable ornate patterning –visually making this piece captivating. The spaces between the boards, channeling light through the piece with minuscule sense of regimented authority adds to this patterning further accentuating the idea of bridging—even light is taken from daylight and allowed to explore travelling through the installation and peeking out the other side with almost musical precision. Bridging cleverly bridges worlds we exist in from numerous insightful angles—that of the handmade and handcrafted to that of the computer-generated and rendered in pixel imagery. It is by no means in error that the 4 x 4 squares grouped together in a predictable formation to create a greater whole remind us of the pixels prevalent in such massive yet imperceptible quantity on our computer screen and are responsible for concocting the digital images we are bombarded with daily.
For its premiere deployment, Bridging has been carefully placed in Portland’s Creative Corridor North Park Blocks where it will stay for the month of November. To the very north, stands Lee Kelly’s magnificent (at 23’ wide, 11’ high and 6’ in depth) cor-ten steel monument, Memory 99 patiently waiting to majestically define future-Pacific Northwest College of Art’s courtyard entrance. To the west, lies the bustling, affluent, and delightfully albeit understandably supercilious Pearl District; to the east, Old Town | Chinatown quivering with self-discovery, robust cultural history, and renewal, where the city’s homeless and destitute can find shelter, food and comfort and the winds of change have blown in to bring both economically refreshing merchant opportunities and significant, community-enhancing educational institutions (one of which is the UO’s own White Stag Block). This entire area, fundamentally, is a place of change, of melding social stratospheres, and a place where a short walk of a few blocks will make it clear just how those who have can, and do, co-mingle with those who have very little. Immediately to the south of Bridging, the North Park Blocks offer a well-used children’s playground, and Hao Baozhu’s generously donated life-sized bronze elephant. Indeed, the location is ideally suited to objects that encourage play, interaction and exploration and, due in large part to the efforts of Portland’s Regional Arts and Culture Council and executive director, Eloise Damrosch there already exists here a sort of city tradition of placing major artwork in the Park Blocks that began with the South Park Blocks and RACC’s public art projects.
Into this socially, economically and culturally vibrant environment, the semi-permanent, pristine Bridging might seem a bit overshadowed, its scale dominated by time-induced patinas of nearby permanent work, its wet and unfinished wood surface prone to the ravages of weather. Indeed, even the towering elms with leaves seasonally adrift surrounding the installation with a framing like quality seem just a bit dwarfing. In only the few days Bridging has been in situ and in the damp, discouraging gray of a Portland afternoon, passersby can’t help but stop and touch, look and wonder. Possibly mostly due to a rain-drizzled surface, not many have ventured to sit down on the invitingly pulled-out boards, made ready to give one a place at the table. However, judging from the top surface scuffed and imprinted with the dark marks of shoe treads, apparently, the piece has proven to have an exploratory “soap-box-like” appeal.
Stand next to Bridging for a little while, dry off a few of those boards, and actually invite people to touch and explore, show them how to sit, put down a coffee cup and something happens. Now public art is not meant to come with directions nor suggestions on how to use the piece or what to do with it, this is in the hands, and delight, of the individual—the chance to explore, to look or to physically experience an object is diplomatically left to one’s own personal discretion. Bridging is a captivating community piece and has so much potential to launch conversations powered by community in a non-rebellious and non-confrontational way that encouraging people to experience the sit-down-with-me connection and interacting withthe audience for Bridging proves an illuminating undertaking.
I tried this one rainy afternoon. With cappuccino in hand, I stood by Bridging, offering explanations and demonstrations to any interested passersby. All were eager to listen. Some asked why. Others seemed to need no explanation as if simply a place to sit was explanation enough. But when I tried the true social experiment, asking the public to share the space with individuals from the community of varying backgrounds, (the reason behind Bridging), things got really interesting.
Philip Speranza writes:
Bridging, 2013 evokes understandings of identity and public service. Citizens and visitors of Portland interact through this art piece to sit, eat, rest and converse, adapting the piece for individual uses. The traditional boundaries of orientation and personal space are intentionally blurred to raise consciousness through unplanned social interactions. Interactions are bridged from one side to another by three types of 4×4 inch cedar units. Long cedar units slide for seating. Shorter interior cedar units slide for play. The two sliding movements give over ownership of the form to the user. Outer cedar units are fixed.
When I had the opportunity to explain the intention of Bridging, people were interested; when I pulled out and gestured to the boards ready for them to sit, things were a little more tense. With Speranza’s directive in mind, I purposefully welcomed anyone who walked by the installation to take a seat and learn about the piece. I offered, with equal hospitality, a place to gentlemen pushing tarp-covered grocery carts piled high with worldly possessions and to debonair, pipe-smoking urbane individuals. Both seemed reluctant to acknowledge or sit close to the other. Many times, if one sat down, the other left. Admittedly, it is a tall order-to ask and to expect mere strangers to sit with each other as if acquainted. Was it the social distance or the lack of familiarity with one another? Bridging was compelling us to recognize there are barriers, invisible, intangible, but barriers nonetheless.
Bridging being used by local residents.
Speranza says, “Subsequent installations will bridge unintended social interactions between citizens with regard to neighborhood orientation and will occur for approximately one month in each O’Bryant Park, Jameson Square and Holladay Park through the winter 2014.” One can’t help but wonder what the reception at these other places will be and what that will say about our own dear neighborhood. Speranza and his group of students have mindfully moved past divisions and asked us to graciously move past them, too: recognizing the socioeconomics of what surrounds us might be one of our most important observations. Unquestionably, much of urban life allows us to exist in a bubble of our own comfort level. It is places like the Creative Corridor, and the North Park Blocks where exploring these divisions can make a difference.
You can ask yourself how you would react in this situation, if asked in a pleasant outdoor park to sit down and share your space with a complete stranger, be he dressed similarly or vastly different from yourself and in varying degrees of cleanliness. Would you sit down and share a conversation? Would it be exhilarating or exhausting? Awkward or illuminating? Portland is a vibrant city, attractive to permanent residents and tourists; the region spanning the Pearl District and Old Town | Chinatown accommodates feelings of belonging from diverse backgrounds and economic levels compelling solutions that embrace the real essence of a city: the ability to cope with everything from hardship to success, from recession and homelessness to affluence and excess. Bridging, in a small way, reflects these imperative ingredients—urging us to sit and engage in dialogue or proximity to every aspect of our city, from ethnic diversity, to economic hardship and the unhomed, to the luxury of high-priced retail shops and social opportunities in bars and clubs of varying clientele and challenges us to make something of an experience or recognize the need for a solution embracing tolerance and diversity.
Bridging gently encourages and challenges us to reach new conclusions about the people in our neighborhood, about us. And it has provided a group of University of Oregon students an opportunity to experiment with how shared experiences and collaborations can be kindled and the possibility of inviting people to feel a sense of belonging.
Kristin Calhoun, Public Art Manager of the Regional Arts and Culture Council, commented,
The work is an open-ended invitation for people to come together and relate to each other on a very basic human level- sharing a meal together. I am looking forward to seeing and experiencing the work in the various locations and seeing how the stories unfold. That is part of the magic of putting work out into the public to me, seeing how it is received, used & interpreted by the broadest possible audience.
Speaking more towards how this project melds into the intentions of the UO School of Architecture and Allied Arts, administrative director of the UO AAA in Portland, Kate Wagle lucidly articulates,
Bridging embodies the highest and best values of UO’s School of Architecture and Allied Arts. Intellectual speculation, hands-on experimentation, and open-ended social activism, applied in the service of ‘making good’, ideas, conversations and experiences in the context of real community.
This last week, protestors once again gathered in downtown Portland to bring attention to the Occupy movement, and the city was reminded of the importance of community, and the power of community. As the waterfront of Portland was dotted with protestors, some of them masked, and mounted police stood by ready to subdue these contemporary insurgents, Bridging took on a new meaning. Rather than such collisions of politics and people, of police and protestor, are there ways we can offer a better incubator to solutions by tolerance and diversity being invited to sit at the same table? We have Portland—and this remarkable Creative Corridor—within which contains the components of a vital urban future—from the wandering nomadic-like unhomed, to the struggling recession-emerging businesses to economically vibrant shops, restaurants, world-renown places of creativity and innovation and the thriving intellectual university and college environment –all prevail along our streets effectively bringing us together. Sit at the table of Bridging and talk to your neighbor…. from unexpected collaborations, to unpredicted connections: so much is possible.
In the timeless words of American singer-songwriter, folk musician, Woody Guthrie, “this land is your land, this land is my land.” Please take a moment to stop by Bridging and take your place at the table; because it is yours and it is mine, and we should all be talking.
[Bridging is installed in through the Regional Arts & Culture Council’s in situ PORTLAND which seeks to place challenging temporary works in public that will serve as a catalyst for dialogue about art and/or contemporary issues.]
Students involved in this project and their original project titles that culminated in Bridging, are:
Adaptable Interaction, Jesse Alvizar and Natalie Cregar
Enlightening Celebration, Vijayeta Davda and Sermin Yesilada
Philanthropy Mapping, Tina Wong
Framing Experience, Grace Aaraj and Charley Danner
Translucent Outreach, Wilfredo Sanchez
Visual Permeability, Srivarshini Balaji and Timothy Niou
Integrative Filter, Oliver Brandt and Hanna Lirman
Cognitive Exposure, Haley Blanco and Jenna Pairolero
Acoustic Interweaving, Eli Rosenwasser and Henry Smith
