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THE BOOK

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ABOUT THE BOOK
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THE BLOG

Camps: A Guide to 21st Century Space
The Visibility Principle
Working Father Magazine
Curiosity Shop
Dematerializing the Screened Porch
Milestone Birthdays
The Idea of Order in Your Neighbor's Garage
To Each His Own Cup Holder
Weighing in On the Kindle
The High-Functioning Workaholic
Norma Kamali Doesn't Care About Brands
The Secret Life of Scarves
Extreme Urbanism: AdbouMaliq Simone and Teddy Cruz
Everybody Does Everything
Curating the Self
Richard Sennett on The Craftsman
Deranged Self-Help
Simple birthday projects
Teaching Office Design with Malcolm Gladwell
Looks Green To Me
Hanging out on the fire escape (with Thomas van Leeuwen, Saul Bass and Greg Martin)
The Other Mother (Coraline)
D.I.Y Valentines
My Lunch with Lovink
Interobjectivity Lessons with Bruno Latour
We're Going on a Cool Hunt
Corner Office
The Dessert Service
Regifting
Arranging the Meal with Jean-Louis Flandrin
Finding My Match
Outliers (by Malcolm Gladwell)
Kurve, Kone, or Krone?
Ron Carlson Writes A Story
M. F. K. Fisher among the Pots and Pans
It's a place card! It's a menu!
Welcome to the Phatocracy
At home with Hannah Woolley
Inappropriate
Support a small press near you this season
Facebook Fictions
Close Reading: Obama
Are you a recessionista?
Countertop Oven
Oprah Nation
A Palin Halloween
Seeking Mrs. Polonius
The Vanguard Party
The Year We Walked to School
Comic Craft
Design Observance
Sarah Boone's Ironing Board
Beth Lipman, Still Lives in Glass
Next American City wins redesign award
Design is Communication. Duh.
File Tabs: The Tip of the Iceberg
Collage Professor

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Camps: A Guide to 21st Century Space

Camps: A guide to 21st Century Architecture

Camp is school by other means. Whether the kids love camp or hate it, parents crave the structured time. And the potholders.

Charlie Hailey has written a smart, fresh, and eminently packable guidebook to camp architecture — perfect for reading on the beach at Guantanamo Bay.

Entitled Camps: A Guide to 21st Century Space, the book floats the simple premise that camps define the temporary landscapes of globalization and mobilization. (Build quickly, travel light, and keep moving.) Meanwhile, “Camp” itself is a Big Tent Term that zones the the dream of self-discovery by means of marshmallows alongside the dark disciplinary barracks of ethnic cleansing, environmental catastrophe, and the war on terror. Bambi goes to Buchenwald.

This MIT production is attractively designed by Emily Gutheinz to evoke the field guides of yore. The volume bears a a Kraft paper jacket, an exposed binding, and small reference-style photos and drawings throughout.

Gutheinz handles the theming with a light touch, like a Girl Scout earning her Grunge badge. And Charlie Hailey approaches theory the same way, writing about Giorgio Agamben with the scurrying style of a kid penning a postcard from the “periodic autonomous zone” of a neo-Marxist computer camp.

The summer destination of choice in my household has been Camp Gilboa, part of a socialist-Zionist youth movement whose roots go back to the founding of the state of Israel, a nation whose history could be defined as a long and bitter engagement with the challenges of encampment (from Exodus to Gaza). My daughter Lucy, age 9,when gently inducted into the facts of the Holocaust, replied, “Jewish children go to nicer camps now, don’t they?” Mine certainly do.

FOOTNOTE: I first read about the book in the LA Times.

— Julia Lupton · 2009-06-26


The Visibility Principle

Jen Northrop's office

Nearly everybody likes a neat desk, even if they don’t have one. Some of us justify our sloppy ways by saying that all those piles of paper are proof of our busy lives and active minds. There’s some truth to that, of course, but some of the stuff sitting on my desk right now has absolutely no reason to be there.

My colleague Jennifer Northrop is Director of Communications and Marketing at Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum. I have always admired her tidy desk—this is someone who knows how to put stuff away when she doesn’t need it any more. But not every piece of paper gets banished to her file cabinet or the recycling bin. Neatly pinned to a long wall in her office are dozens of postcards, press kits, and newspaper ads, representing the visual identities of several years worth of Cooper-Hewitt exhibitions and programs. When Jen is working at her desk or talking to colleagues, she can see physical evidence of what the museum is all about. She can instantly understand how it fits together and how it’s been changing. That wall of images is a visualization of her job.

I call this the “visibility principle.” When stuff is important to what you’re doing, make it visible. Make it easy to see your calendar. Make it easy to know what time it is. Make it easy to see things that inspire you.

At a certain point, however, the visible becomes…invisible. Things disappear, fading into the proverbial woodwork because we no longer want or need to see them. Then it’s time to put them away.

— Ellen Lupton · 2009-06-23