Shark-U-Like

[imomus]

On my last day in Denver I take a little morning break from the AIGA conference to tour the city's culture districts; the Center for the Performing Arts (gigantic kulturbunker), the Santa Fe Art District ("funky" alternamall for the local creative class) and the Daniel Libeskind-designed Art Museum.



The Santa Fe art district is a few blocks outside the iconic-comfortable centre of town, and -- as usual when trying to walk anywhere in American cities that aren't New York -- you only really pass homeless people (who ask you for tobacco and matches) and cars on the way there. Nobody else is walking on Santa Fe, and there aren't even any shops to stop in at. The art district (currently in the midst of some sort of festival) is a classic alternamall, with a bunch of "contemporary art galleries" showing mediocre or downright kitschy work. Nothing interesting to see here, folks!

Accompanied by the melancholy Western wail of train horns I walk back towards the centre of town through Bail Bond City, a whole district full of Spanish-speaking bungalow offices who'll help you stay free as you await trial for, well, horse-rustling or vagrancy or whatever. I remember seeing an abundance of these law-shacks in Arizona too. Can there really be so much crime here that you need a whole city of bail bond people? What's this all about?

Just beyond the bail bonds (and some centres for unemployed black people) looms the "iconic" Art Museum. But what's it an icon for? A knife, slicing into Denver? A shark, about to rip open the belly of its prey? Libeskind's building is in a style I find rather distasteful, a showy, aggressive style I call "sharkitecture". It expresses all too clearly a kind of Hobbsian worldview, it seems to me: dog-eat-dog, shark-kill-shark, kill-or-be-killed. And, sure enough, Libeskind's other projects are all redolent of dead-sharp angles and death: the Jewish Museum in Berlin (which I've never been inside; I find it rather uninviting) and the planned Freedom Tower in New York. The other leading sharkitect is Zaha Hadid, whose dagger-sharp, fanged shapes I find even more unnecessarily aggressive than Libeskind's.



During his presentation on Thursday, Libeskind called his shape a "cantilevered crystal", which must have pleased the Denver mayor, an ex-geologist. But to me they're sharks. So, too, is the conference center AIGA Next has been taking place in. We delegates have been waffling in the belly of a shark. The city seems to like them. Perhaps it's because it's so far from the sea and doesn't know how horrible real sharks can be.

Actually, there have been some fascinating sessions at this conference. There was ID magazine editor Julie Lasky, for instance, saying that "as in education and healthcare, the US lags behind other countries in its graphic design. Not that there aren't individual things that are excellent, but the overall level is lower". That observation was really brought home by a fascinating presentation on Saturday of three Olympic logos by their creators. Dana Arnett showed Chicago's bid for the 2016 Olympics, a really conservative and even rather fascist-looking torch / city silhouette. Then Patrick Cox of London agency Wolff Olins showed his London 2012 logo.



This logo has been roundly -- almost universally -- condemned (not least by Steve Heller, holding a panel on blogging just across the hall), but -- as I told Cox, an Edinburgh man -- I think it perfectly fulfills the New Ugly / New Rave, energy-before-quality stuff I was talking about last week when I was thinking about the style of a decade which has not yet been named. Cox stressed in his presentation the importance of avoiding already-established "good taste". I tend to agree with the commenter on the Creative Review blog who said:

"I love this logo, yes it's cheesy, brash, crude, but it's a real grower. The confrontational nature and “nowness” of the design is its real strength. When you look at the pedestrian tripe of the Chicago 2016 logo it makes you glad that we live in a city that is willing to take some risks rather than create some garbage based on local landmarks."

There was a teensy cloud of suspicion in my mind, though, that the London logo was the graphic design equivalent of "sharkitecture", and the presentation bore this out. Cox said he wanted Londoners to get actively involved in the Olympics, running with the runners. While that can be seen as "making people proactive" and as "inclusiveness", it shares a problem with what I've called "police woman feminism": that when you make ordinary people into a sportsman -- or force women to compete with men on men's terms -- you're creating second-class sportspeople, and second-class men. You're creating losers. By transforming the city into a huge sports zone you're also edging it a little closer to social Darwinism (social sharkitecture). A survival-of-the-fittest world in which the homeless, criminal deviants in need of bail bonds, and unemployed blacks are ranged around a Disneyfied city centre patrolled by shark-shaped iconic arts centres flanked by pricey loft apartments. Like the shark-shaped cars that swim down the avenues, though, these arts centres are much more friendly inside -- insulated from their own fumes, padded against their own sharp angles, they seem to bring out the Garfield in all of us (I certainly felt a bit like Garfield as I padded back and forward between my comfortable hotel room and the comfortable, sharky conference centre). An image of contemporary America: Garfield piloting a deadly mechanical shark.



The final Olympic graphics presentation was by Min Wang, dean of the School of Design at the Chinese Central Academy of Fine Arts. I liked the non-sharkiness of the 2008 Beijing Olympics design, which emphasizes Chineseness (Wolff Olins tried to avoid appeals to nationalism in their logo) via calligraphic pictograms. The torch and medals are particularly nice: they look like elegant old relics of some former dynasty. Although I like London's New Rave logo, I can't detach its sharp angles from my feelings about Western aggression, symbolized by knives, axes, predatory eagles and sharks. Even the horses unveiled by young designers during the Command X panel game (itself worryingly Social Darwinist, with its "weakest link" structure) looked manic, possessed and deranged to me.

Just before I left the stage after my presentation moderator Kurt Andersen asked me why I seemed to like the "capitals of the Axis powers" -- Berlin and Tokyo -- so much. "At the risk of sounding terribly Calvinist and Scottish, it's because guilt is good," I explained. "Having been on the wrong side during World War II has made Germany and Japan much more cautious about expressing aggression in their cultures. Look at the World Cup 2006 logo: a couple of friendly, smiling, bouncy balls. That's based on a taboo on aggression -- a taboo I didn't see in the football logos of the Command X designers."

Andersen made a comment about Japanese culture retaining a childishness, perhaps because of that guilt and fear of aggression, and I responded with Murakami's use of the title Little Boy for his Japan Society show: the name of the Hiroshima bomb, but also the image of a Peter-Pan-like otaku. Peter Pan also has a scary shark lurking just out of sight, of course: the one that nipped off Captain Hook's hand.

Comments

[cutup.livejournal.com]

think it was an alligator/crocodile (disney version, anyway).

[imomus.livejournal.com]

You're right about the crocodile, but a shark does figure somewhere:

[alphacomp.livejournal.com]

Why must all sharp edges imply aggressiveness and social darwinistic tendencies?

I'd say that most of I.M. Pei's work has a certain sort of friendliness attached to its tidy right angles and repetitive triangular forms, for example.

Perhaps the collaboration between sharp edges and aggressive textures/colors might be the case? Liebskind's use of dark grey metal panels make the art museum look like some sort of low-poly Space Battleship Yamato. Alternately, what sharkish businessman would wear the pink featured in the London 2012 logo?

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

Long live the unangle! (http://lord-whimsy.livejournal.com/78369.html)

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

Actually, I've been in the water with sharks most of my life, even great white sharks,and having been refined over 100 million years, they are quite rounded and beautiful. My wife once pet one as it slid by our cage. That said, they'll take a chunk out of you if you loll about on the surface, so perhaps the term is earned more by what they do rather than how they look.



But yes, the "sharkitecture" of Libeskind and Hadid are very unappealing, in that one senses aggression, arrogance and contempt for the people who must live with their buildings. It's that old stupid art school notion of a culture based on how much you can take, rather than one based on what you love. You know, the sensibility that conflates reassuring environments with "pablum". But really, isn't it the "edgy" and "confrontational" stuff the true pablum? It's Exxx-treme(TM)!

Calatrava makes dramatic forms in his work while retaining a humane sensibility, but he's seen as "middlebrow", which is to say that average people--you know, the public--actually like being in and around his buildings.

And I despise that London logo for the same reasons. Trendy, ugly, unharmonious, weak Gestalt and completely lacking in context. Ugliness doesn't shock anymore--that's our cultural default. Shocking (or at least surprising) with harmony and beauty once in a while might be nice--but then, it's all about forced novelty and that predictable (and eminently marketable) individual maverick "in yer face" spirit, no? Pft.

[microworlds.livejournal.com]

I think the only sharp edges on sharks are found in their mouths and fins.


This shark actually looks friendly and non aggressive! It's smiling! :D :D :D

[microworlds.livejournal.com]

ONE DOES NOT SIMPLY WALK INTO ANGULAR BUILDINGS!

[microworlds.livejournal.com]

(http://tinypic.com)

[mme-furiosa.livejournal.com]

I must agree that Libeskind tends to produce atrocious rubbish (but don't ALL the "starchitects" e.g. Gehry, Koolhaas, Eisenman, etc?)

Zaha Hadid, however, seems to have begun designing buildings that are sculptural and perhaps even sensual, for instance:



also of note is her performing arts center in Abu Dhabi (no comment on the acoustics of so much glass!)

www.alpoma.net/tecob/?p=689

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

That's gorgeous.

Something rather appealing about these, too. Brings to mind my pitcher plants.



Toyo Ito's work is very nice too, as in this lake resort in Spain:

[situationgirl.livejournal.com]

How sorry I am that I didn't know you were in Denver, I had banned myself from Livejournal for a week to study for midterm exams.

I've always thought that the buildings you mentioned looked like ships. In fact there are several about town that seem to me like pirate office buildings under siege, or corporate aircraft carriers about to launch attack. That fits very much into your shark theme, I think.

I've not been to the Santa Fe art district, which is probably for the best. Most art I see is along Santa Fe anyway, on the light rail line, near those trains you heard. The Alameda station is home to the two statues that look like break-dancing terra cotta Aztecs. Mostly I like to watch the grafitti grow, and monitor the progress of building destruction at Broadway and I-25. My favorite painting hanging at Cu-Denver's library is of the destroyed buidling, as seen through dirty glass. I think what I like about it is that it's filtered, crumbling.

[lolmike.livejournal.com]

Two things:

The Royal Ontario Museum, in Toronto, recently had a sharkitechty facelift (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Royal_Ontario_Museum.jpg). It sucks. I used to live a couple of blocks away, and the old, regal museum was really comforting, both to walk by, and to wander in. The new "crystal" is ubermodern and, apparently, leaks (http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/Page/document/v5/content/subscribe?user_URL=http://www.theglobeandmail.com%2Fservlet%2Fstory%2FRTGAM.20071003.wrom1003%2FBNStory%2FEntertainment%2Fhome&ord=4366414&brand=theglobeandmail&force_login=true).

Secondly, the most beautiful Olympic logo I've seen in a long time (and history indicates you'll agree) is for Tokyo 2016 (http://www.tokyo2016.or.jp/en/news/whatsnew/information/logo.html). I'm also quite pleased with the font choice. It gives me that now-rare feeling of being pleased with the future.

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

What an asinine thing to do to an existing building--it detracts from both designs. There's absolutely no sense of scale, or even the remotest relationship between the two. But hey--it's "challenging"!

That is a nice logo. It has an optimistic, forward-looking, harmonious tone. Isn't that supposed to the the point of the Olympics?

[zenmonkeykstop.livejournal.com]

Libeskind's stuff is a bit samey (the recent ROM addition being a good example) but if you, actually living in Berlin, haven't been inside the Jewish Musem, go now. It's the only modern building I've ever been in that was both designed and succeeded in inducing a primal emotional state. Actually, several. It's not much from the outside, but pay the admission fee. I'll reimburse you next time I'm on the continent if necessary.

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

Something disconcertingly blank about many contemporary buildings. One gets a sense of the ego of the architect, but little is left over for the visitor. Akin to talking to someone rather than with someone. There's precious little "conversation".


http://www.axolotl.org/

[cap-scaleman.livejournal.com]

The 'sharkitecture' examples in this entry makes me think of Googie (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Googie). Though a bit sharper, and less The Jetsons (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jetsons).

SHARK??? SHARK?????!!!!!!!!

[electricwitch.livejournal.com]

IT WAS A FREUDIAN CROCODILE. IT THOUGHT HE TASTED SO GOOD HE SEXUALLY HARRASSED HIM FOR YEARS.

*goes into 30 page Peter Pan rant*.

[electricwitch.livejournal.com]

ALSO THE CROCODILE SYMBOLISES MORTALITY. MORTALITY AND SEX. IDK WHY YOUR THINKING IT´S A SHARK ANNOYS ME SO MUCH, BUT IT REALLY, REALLY DOES.

[microworlds.livejournal.com]

I was going to comment before you saw this post with
"*waits for electricwitch to comment on the police woman feminism comment*"

I'm surprised you were more bothered by the alligator comment!

[kumakouji.livejournal.com]

The Denver Art Museum is ugly as hell. It's funny that you mention "Sharkitecture"; The London Olympic Aquatic Centre has been in the news a lot lately here. It's been dubbed "The Ray" (because it looks like a manta ray) by numerous people and it has a similar sort of harsh, streamlined look:



What is everyone's obsession with "futuristic" architecture? I too would like to see a gentler, more organic approach to architecture.

I'm somewhat torn regarding the 2012 olympic logo. I think it's fantastic that we're willing to go out on a limb and really pick something thats shocked so many people... but even so, it's just designers jumping on the nu-rave bandwagon which has been going since the early 2000s. It's already looking a little tierd and hackneyed to me and the olympics are years away.

It's funny that you mention your dislike of Cox's desire for London to become as you term it "a sports zone", yet you approve of Beijing's logo; Beijing's Logo is a supposed to represent the kanji "京" meaning "capital" changed into a running man...

"Anderson made a comment about Japanese culture retaining a childishness, perhaps because of that guilt and fear of aggression"

Did you ever see Japanese Government's Ministry of Defense's public material explaining their "military" to the Japanese public (http://kumakouji.blogspot.com/2007/08/blog-post_7807.html)?:




They used a little girl! With pink hair! and a teddy bear! But it's not completely cute... she stamps on him and make him bleed!

Japan is indeed a strange, strange country.

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

You think that's harsh? Looks light and graceful to me. Anything modeled on a living thing is likely to be agreeable in form--nature's been at the drawing board for four billion years, you know.

Now, we can probably agree that this is truly brutal: LA's Caltrans Building.

[electricwitch.livejournal.com]

CROCODILE NOT A SHARK. SYMBOLICALLY CASTRATING CROCODILE.

SERIOUSLY. I´M STILL ANNOYED.

[snert.livejournal.com]

The origin of the Beijing Olympics logo, courtesy samandsam:

[flying-squid.livejournal.com]

Okay, I don't like oppressive regimes as much as the next guy, but that's just muck-racking.

"a whole city of bail bond people? What's this all about?"

[agoraphiliac.livejournal.com]

Getting arrested may be one of the main activities in Denver. I have only anectdotal evidence, though.

A few weeks ago on a city bus I listened in on a conversation with a Katrina exile from New Orleans ("they said the plane was going to Houston, but it landed here"). He had been given probation for playing his music too loud at his barbecue. He was on his way to a court-mandated therapy appointment for the same crime; the therapy costs 125 dollars a month for nine months, so it's effectively another form of punishment. He said, "Denver: arrive on vacation, leave on probation."

[certifiedbobcat.livejournal.com]

When you look at the pedestrian tripe of the Chicago 2016 logo it makes you glad that we live in a city that is willing to take some risks rather than create some garbage based on local landmarks.
I loved this bit. Chicago is by all means big enough to be an international city, but it's leadership is so obsessed with trying to prove that it has local culture that you don't really see anything else, like New York's little brother that you can't really take seriously.

[dmlaenker.livejournal.com]

On a smaller scale, Richmond (obviously not quite a world city) is obsessed with being like Charlotte. I imagine the local leadership like some kind of urbanist Jan Brady: "Why can't we be more like Charlotte? Everything happens to Charlotte! Charlotte, Charlotte, Charlotte!"

It's a fine city with a large emerging arts community that (to contrast with Chicago's example) is endlessly ignored. They should stop trying to be like Charlotte and start trying to be like a mid-sized American capital that matters: Nashville, Raleigh, Sacramento, Madison....

Denver

[(Anonymous)]

Momus,

As a Denver citizen, it has been interesting to read your observations about my city. A few notes:

1. I like the Libeskind building because there used to be a parking lot there.

2. I like the Santa Fe arts district because there used to be nothing there. It has become very commercial in the last five years, and most of the interesting or experimental work has moved elsewhere (like the much less expensive River North area). But still, it used to be empty buildings.

There are a lot more stories like these, and the thing that's hard to grasp as a first-time visitor is that, as early as ten years ago, Denver used to be a complete cultural void, and as least now we making sincere attempts on a personal and governmental level to shift the city out of its former anti-density, anti-creativity, anti-culture mentality.

So we may not ever be as dynamic, interesting, and arty as Berlin or New York, but we're really trying to build our city into something other than a miserable cow-town, and I think it's starting to show.

--Ryan

Re: Denver

[(Anonymous)]

Exactly!

A design critic would do well to research the design history of a given place before passing judgment. Remember, Momus, we're talking about Denver, a city that has never enjoyed status as an international design mecca, much less an international ... well ... anything. I think we need to ratchet down our expectations of a relatively minor large US city.

New Ugly / New Rave

[pay-option07.livejournal.com]

I guess I'm not as bold at identifying ugly but does that Santa Fe museum use that shark construction to tell time or equinox. The site plan might be interesting to see!

Don't forget Yoshitomo Nara

[flying-squid.livejournal.com]

To go back to your mentioning of Murakami's Little Boy Show..

The children in Nara's paintings carry knives, have fangs, and when they don't have those, most of them look downright menacing to me.

[lil-octopie.livejournal.com]

i really dislike it when people say "ahh it's so ugly, that's so daring"

it's much more daring (and more difficult) to make something beautiful but still forward thinking.

(and that logo is so NOT 'now' it's dreadfully, so 'yesterday's trend') can't even begin to imagine how yesterday it will look by 2012.

[kineticfactory.livejournal.com]

I thought it was meant to be a battleship, a proud, triumphant symbol of Angraeli full-spectrum supremacy or whatever it's called these days.

[bonsai-human.livejournal.com]

Western aggression

Are you really suggesting that aggression is a specifically Western trait, or do you only mean design-wise?

[obliterati.livejournal.com]