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THE BLOGCamps: A Guide to 21st Century Space
THE LINKSApartment Therapy
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Camps: A Guide to 21st Century Space
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
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 |