The design process and praxis of Rei Kawakubo

Cath Hory recently wrote about the news that the Council of Fashion Designers of America will honor Rei Kawakubo with a lifetime achievement award. In the essay she related that she had recently asked Ms. Kawakubo to provide one or two specifics about her design methods.

Rei Kawakubo had replied, by e-mail:

“My design process never starts or finishes. I am always hoping to find something through the mere act of living my daily life. I do not work from a desk, and do not have an exact starting point for any collection. There is never a mood board, I do not go through fabric swatches, I do not sketch, there is no eureka moment, there is no end to the search for something new. As I live my normal life, I hope to find something that click starts a thought, and then something totally unrelated would arise, and then maybe a third unconnected element would come from nowhere. Often in each collection, there are three or so seeds of things that come together accidentally to form what appears to everyone else as a final product, but for me it is never ending. There is never a moment when I think, ‘this is working, this is clear.’ If for one second I think something is finished, the next thing would be impossible to do.

“Often the elements are completely disassociated in time and dimension. One might be an emotion, the next thing a pattern image, the third thing an object or a picture I have seen somewhere. I can never remember when and from where the elements come together in my head. I trust synergy and change. For fall 2012, I was thinking about no design being design, about very ordinary fabric (wool felt) being strong. Somehow, the two-dimension level of thinking became apparent.

“I do not feel happy when a collection is understood too well. For me, White Drama was too easily understood, the concept too clear. I feel better about fall 2012, because it wasn’t too clear, and some people assumed things it had nothing to do with, like the Internet age.

“The struggle to find something new gets more and more difficult with time and experience, so this time, for fall 2012, my feeling was to try to make a collection by doing very little.”

More here via NYT

Not exactly Illmatic but …

“New York is like an island, a big Riker’s island, the cops be out wildn, all i hear are sirens, its all about surviving, same old two step…love model chocha…mommy pop it like she suppose ta“

Like the dancehall sample, especially.

The Bird Woman

The “Bird Woman,” from about 3650 B.C credit Brooklyn Museum

Image from the exhibition “The Dawn of Egyptian Art” currently on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In a review for the NYT Roberta Smith calls the show “a sublime, view-shifting exhibition.”

The show concentrates on the art of Egypt’s predynastic and early dynastic periods, from around 3900 to 2649 B.C.

Rahul Mehrotra and the idea of “Softening thresholds” (Updated)

Harvard Magazine’s May-June 2012 issue, features a great piece highlighting the work of architect Rahul Mehrotra. I know of him mainly through his written and spoken word not through built projects and it was a treat to see the range of his work.

I would note the form, material choices, an aesthetic of contemporary vernacular(ism). Similar in some sense to the work of 2012 Pritzker Prize winner Wang Shu. Between rough, and worked, being historically yet practically contextual.

A key goal for Mehotra is “Softening thresholds” between different sectors of society a point clarified by the firm’s “crazy mix” of historic conservation, new construction, and projects with social motives.

The Hathigaon (a low cost social housing project for mahouts in Rajasthan) seems to share something in spirit with Alejandro Aravena’s Quinta Monroy project, as well. Witness, just visually.

Quinta Monroy by Elemental/Alejandro Aravena

Back at Hathigaon, an elephant and its mahout enter their dwelling. Photograph by Peter Pereira

Plus, later in the piece we read “Though most of the homes still had their original exterior finish of rough local stone, Mehrotra hopes for more customization—with plaster, whitewash, or brightly colored paint—as time passes: ‘We are hoping that in 10 years, you won’t be able to recognize them at all.’ In his years as an architect, he has become less concerned with controlling all details; instead, he is fascinated by the way the residents’ contributions become part of the final product.“

In a late update the NYT blog India Ink posted A Conversation With : Urban Planner Rahul Mehrotra in which the professor laid out his personal agenda; of nuance, a non binary or formulaic positioning “more with how do you shift the planning debate to area-wise planning and away from the blanket planning attitudes that have engulfed the decision-making process in our cities…For the sake of the future of our cities and for safeguarding the kind of pluralism that exists…we need to nuance our planning by having different approaches for different parts of the urban landscape.“

Fang Lizhi reviews Ezra F. Vogel on Deng Xiaoping

I believe I came across this old(ish) piece in the New York Review of Books on The Real Deng while learning as much as I could about The Bo Xilai scandal. Perhaps, from a link via James Fallows?….

In it, back in November 2011 Fang Lizhi reviewed Ezra F. Vogel’s book on Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China. Therein, Fang Lizhi takes Vogel’s general boosterism to task. To wit…

The policies on economic growth and on “reform and opening,” which reversed the Mao-era policies of “class struggle,” were seen as progressive and were welcomed by people both inside and outside China. The rub was in Deng’s insistence on the “Four Basic Principles,” namely (1) the socialist road, (2) the dictatorship of the proletariat, (3) the leadership of the Communist Party, and (4) Marxism-Leninism-Mao-Zedong-Thought. Of these, only the third really mattered; Deng’s “transformation” (Vogel’s term) had already left the others obsolete.^*Basic Principle Three was the key to understanding what kind of “rich and powerful China” Deng had in mind. It also put limits on what could be meant by “reform” and “opening.”

Lizhi then goes on explaining for any apologists.

Western observers have found it incongruous that Deng was so active in pushing economic reform but so stubborn in preventing political reform—as if these were in some way contradictory policies. But there was no contradiction: one policy was aimed to bring wealth to the Party-connected elite and the other was aimed to preserve its power. To use the Party’s army to suppress student protesters who threatened Party wealth and power was entirely consistent with his basic principles.

Kazi and Madlib : ‘A.V.E.R.A.G.E’

via Fact Magazine feature The Essential… Madlib

Aerial view of New York City, looking north, on December 16, 1951

(Courtesy NYC Municipal Archives)

Via Atlantic’s In Focus here

*It is interesting to note the heavy, visual presence of the piers and the working waterfront in old NYC, much of which is now, filled in with dredge/reclamation (witness site of Twin Towers) and others being now turned into parks and water access.

For example something like the image below, via PLaNYC 2030 document on Parks and Public Space, which visions much of the NW shoreline of Manhattan greened.

Goal: Ensure all New Yorkers live within a ten-minute walk of a park via http://www.nyc.gov/html/planyc2030/html/theplan/public-spaces.shtml

Trajectories continued through vehicles such as PlaNYC 2030 visions of NYC “as a waterfront city” with a green littoral zone of parks not just of urban density and skyscrapers or more mundane modes ie: real estate residential growth.