Tag: D-Crit

May 14, 2014

Thinking Outside the Shipping Container

Giuseppe Lignano has no architect friends. When not at work, the founding partner of architecture firm LOT-EK would rather hang out with people outside the industry instead.

School teachers, businessmen, chefs and even housewives — his love for meeting people from diverse backgrounds and cultures mirrors the industrial bricolage his studio has become famous for. While most architecture firms design buildings to be made of glass, concrete and steel, LOT-EK has used kitchen sinks as cabinets, petroleum trailer tanks as bedrooms, and stainless steel truck bodies as homes. Over the last two decades, the studio Lignano started with his long-time collaborator, Ada Tolla, has been turning non-traditional architecture elements into standout designs.

“I like to be more of an outsider in everything I do,” says Lignano, looking smart in a fitting blue shirt and dark denim jeans. Even the clothes on the 50-year-old reflect how the gay man has always seen himself outside of New York city’s straight “white-male dominated” architecture industry with “their all black outfits”.

Lignano first came to the United States with Tolla after they graduated from architecture school in Italy. Bowled over by how modern New York was compared to their hometown in Naples, the duo moved to Manhattan for a postgraduate fellowship at Columbia University in 1990. Three years later, they set up LOT-EK to pursue their fascination with the city’s industrial landscape, which has defined their design vocabulary ever since.

Fire escapes, airplane fuselages, steel ducts and other detritus of the industrialized society are examples of the “Roman aqueduct now seen in the making,” says Lignano, proof of how we live today when archaeologists dig up the ground in 2,000 years time. But rather than leave them to waste till then, he sees the perfect building blocks for design.

“As a civilization, we would feel much less guilty if we had the ability of looking at what we make with enthusiasm and say we could do this with this, instead of just freaking out that we are accumulating millions of containers,” he says. “I think it would be a great thing, a really beautiful thing not only in architecture.”

This palpable love for human creativity — measured by his distinct left eyebrow that arches upwards whenever the grey bearded Lignano speaks excitedly — can be traced back to when he decided to become an architect. Barely ten years old, he had visited his uncle’s newly renovated apartment, and was blown away by how the architect had transformed the space. Uncle Franco became a huge inspiration in Lignano’s pursuit of wild and imaginative designs, which went so far that even the mentor said his nephew’s works were “completely crazy” and unacceptable to the world.

From turning an airplane container cargo into a personal workstation and using a cement mixer as a cocoon for watching television and playing video games, LOT-EK has gone from designing such installations for art galleries and museums to building architecture, most notably with the shipping container. The studio has converted them into mobile retail stores for PUMA and Uniqlo and will be inserting into New York’s Pier 57 some four-levels of containers filled with — not goods, but — a market, restaurants, and studios for artisan businesses that will turn the former shipping hub into a cultural and civic center.

More recently, LOT-EK has also gone beyond repurposing the shipping container to building with them. Lining one side of its container-like second-floor studio along Chrystie Street are various architecture models that are as arresting as the neon yellow and grey interiors. What looks like New York’s winding Guggenheim museum turned on its side is a proposal for a public library design consisting of 170 containers sliced, carved and stacked to create seven wheel-like structures joined together. Another model resembling a floating spaceship is actually an art school built in South Korea where LOT-EK sheared eight containers along a 45-degree angle, assembled them in a fishbone pattern, and elevated the entire structure.

These works are more than just futuristic-looking. Lignano takes down each model to explain how LOT-EK is “creating space by removal,” working like “skillful butchers” to cut open rectangular containers to different shapes, and combining them to make out-of-the-box buildings and spaces. This radical approach has gained LOT-EK media attention and helped it win prizes, including being a finalist for the National Design Awards in 2008. But up till today, the studio still struggles to get clients.

“A lot of people that have started much later than us have completely gone so much more than we have from a business point of view,” says Lignano. “The hardest part has been the fact that there is a lot of people they call because they think this is a very cheap way of building. So in a way they call for the wrong reasons. Because we don’t do this because it is cheap, we do this because it is smart for what it is.”

But beyond an ecologically smart way of design, or what it now markets as “upcycling,” Lignano believes in his approach because of how creative it is. It is what has kept him going for so long despite the lack of major commercial success until recently. This belief has helped LOT-EK grow from just Tolla and him working by day and waiting tables at night, to a team of 15 now serving clients in the US, Holland, Japan and China.

In that twenty years, New York city has also grown up as polished skyscrapers now overshadow its once chaotic industrial landscape. Even as his sources of inspiration are cleaned up, Lignano sees opportunities for LOT-EK’s works which has “more grit, more personality,” unlike the “boring” New York architecture scene which he likens to Wall Street.

In this sense, Lignano is no outsider. LOT-EK’s diverse, layered and a little rough around the edges architecture is exactly what New York city is — once you’re on the inside.

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Written for Adam Levy’s Art of the Interview class at D-Crit.

May 14, 2014

A Tale of Two Cities, and a Bridge

CREDIT: INTERNATIONAL CENTRE OF PHOTOGRAPHY

Despite its name, the Brooklyn Bridge has always seemed to belong more to Manhattan than to Brooklyn. Weegee’s 1940 photo of lighting bolt apparently striking the then Bank of Manhattan Trust Building says as much. By foregrounding the photo with the Brooklyn Bridge leading to the skyscrapers of Manhattan — and with Brooklyn nowhere in sight — Weegee captured a popular view of the bridge that follows, and has been followed, by many who have photographed it. The typical act of photographing the Brooklyn Bridge probably goes something like this: cross over to the Brooklyn end of the bridge, turn around, and point your camera towards Lower Manhattan. Unlike the mess of low-rise buildings and wharves of Brooklyn, the gleaming skyscrapers across the East River form the prefect backdrop to accompany the engineering marvel.

But the Brooklyn Bridge was not always portrayed as the umbilical cord of Manhattan. When the bridge first opened on 24th May, 1883, many newspapers and magazines ran a color painting depicting the grand display of fireworks above it through the “view from New York, looking towards Brooklyn.” Another illustration from the same period also depicted the bridge from this perspective, although it is actually difficult to tell the two cities apart. Then, Manhattan had not yet been planted with the skyline of skyscrapers that would one day distinguish it from Brooklyn. In fact, when the bridge was built, Brooklyn was an independent city and it wasn’t until close to two decades later in 1898 that it was consolidated with the other boroughs to form the modern New York City that we know today.

When it first opened, the Brooklyn Bridge was the world’s first steel-wire suspension bridge and boasted the longest span in the world, stretching some 1,600 feet from tower to tower. Such an engineering feat foretold the coming of new construction techniques that would revolutionize buildings in the early 20th century, leading to the birth and proliferation of skyscrapers in Manhattan, the world’s financial capital. It was such a city that Weegee — then known as Arthur Felling — arrived at in 1909 when he traveled from Austria to join his father here. By then, the tale of two cities between the Brooklyn Bridge was already set in motion. Living for close to six decades in New York, Weegee saw the bridge struggle to hold on to Manhattan and Brooklyn as a growing gap in development emerged. Even his photos showed that: most of it were shot in Manhattan, where life in New York City happened. On the other hand, Brooklyn, in the words of one observer, was just the “bedroom” for the thousands who worked in Manhattan.

As capital and construction flowed towards Manhattan, so did the Brooklyn Bridge. It seemed Brooklyn was no longer worthy to frame the bridge named after it. Photo after photo from the 1960s onwards depict it against the skyline of Manhattan, which together formed a picture perfect postcard of New York City’s engineering and financial might combined. Some five years after Weegee passed away in 1968, this image was cemented in the minds of the people. Then, a new architectural and engineering marvel had arrived in Manhattan: the World Trade Center, which was the tallest buildings in the world when it completed in 1973. These twin buildings, each standing at 1,368 feet, mirrored Brooklyn Bridge’s two towers — except both were in Manhattan. As the World Trade Center became recognized as quintessentially New York over the years, so did this view of the Brooklyn Bridge foregrounding it. In the years after the 9-11 tragedy, the bridge seemed to lose some of its distinction without the missing World Trade Center towers. Something just seemed missing in photos, although the upcoming One World Trade Center should restore Manhattan’s allure over the Brooklyn Bridge.

Manhattan’s monopoly over the gaze of the Brooklyn Bridge may not be for much longer though. With gentrification and its growing reputation as a hip neighborhood to live, work and play, it is getting tougher to overlook Brooklyn. The borough has seen a few skyscrapers spring up too, although nothing particularly notable in terms of architecture yet. But why should it follow in the footsteps of Manhattan and fall into some race for the skies? The conversion of Brooklyn’s former piers and wharves into parks and other kind of public spaces create a different kind of background and frame for the Brooklyn Bridge, which could be just as interesting when viewed across the river.

Like how the Brooklyn Bridge’s suspension system is kept together by tension, the disparity between Manhattan and Brooklyn is what keeps people returning to photograph this New York City icon. We each pick our sides and angles to get a picture of what we think the city looks like through our eyes.

Manhattan or Brooklyn, which side are you on?

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Written for Adam Levy’s Researching Design class at D-Crit.

May 7, 2014

Arranging a Room Full of Possibilities

For years, I did not sleep on a bed. While most people fuss about making their bed sheets and buying the right mattress, I’ve never had to think of these when I slept on a tatami mat.

Such rice straw mattresses are more commonly used as floors in Japanese-style homes. I lived in a public housing apartment in Singapore with only a single mattress big enough for me to lie on. It could be folded into a compact accordion in seconds, and laying the mattress to start and end the day became a ritual. After arising from slumber every morning, I would flip the bed up on its side, and fold it to keep at one corner of my room until it was time to sleep again.

The impermanence of where I slept turned my bedroom into a space of possibilities. Some days, I woke up to the sight of my neighborhood. And on other nights, I turned in under the watchful eyes of the world map and graphic posters plastered on the wall perpendicular to the windows. With the bed tucked into a corner whenever I was awake, the room became my office, a sanctuary to read, a spot for meals, and a cocoon for contemplation.

This flexibility mirrors the regular shifts in a room where I assembled and formed my identity for over two decades. My family and I moved into this two-story apartment on the sixth floor when I was five years old. I used to share one of the three bedrooms with my grandmother until she passed away after I turned twelve. With the room to myself, it became a canvas for the teenage me to fashion who I wanted to be.

Then, I did not have a tatami mattress yet. But I was already without a bed, a nomad in my room. The adults had decided it would be more spacious if my grandmother and I slept on mattresses without bed frames so they could be kept aside in the day. Rather than fill the void with the passing of my grandmother, I kept this arrangement and cherished the newfound space.

Arranging your room is an act of constructing self in material form. One of the first things I moved in was a shelving system from IKEA. This became an early framework to house my life. While the room’s in-built cabinets hid my clothes along one wall, perpendicular to it were the open shelves that displayed my youth: books by Roald Dahl, science fiction novels like Robotech, and space-aged LEGO toys.

As I grew up, so did the contents of the shelves. What once took up half a wall next to my door eventually stretched the full length up to my window. Throughout the years, I periodically re-arranged the shelves and its contents to make room for new interests in my life. First came the computer magazine, MacAddict, and books on Steve Jobs and his company, Apple. Then I started buying CDs: Matchbox Twenty, Fastball and Oasis. In the mix also came political manifestos and guides, as Bertrand Russell, Karl Marx and Michel Foucault moved in. They became neighbors to a burgeoning book collection on Singapore history and culture. The newest kids in the block were the stacks of design books as well as flyers and catalogues picked up from exhibitions and galleries over the years.

Like sediment layers, these reflected my own evolution. But I treated the shelves more like a jigsaw to my life. Often, I appropriated, adapted and arranged the artifacts on the shelves to create self-portraits. As I cleaned the dust and looked at these things through time, I could review my life, revisit my memories and rewrite my story. Things that no longer mattered were thrown out, others gained prominence, and often, new connections were discovered.

The annual spring cleaning that comes with every Chinese New Year was always an opportunity to give the room a major reconfiguration. For a while, I had a table integrated with the shelves as I sat facing the wall of books. When I wanted to expand my worldview, I shifted perspective to the windows instead. As the room’s edges ebbed and flowed, the only constant was an open space in the middle where everyday I laid out my tatami mattress—a gift from my parents who decided if I was to sleep on the floor then I should lie on something intended for it. Although they did not mean to do so, it was also a reminder that my room was still a part of their apartment.

As I approached thirty, it became more and more difficult to keep reshuffling my room. The shelves multiplied in numbers, and as more books and artifacts weighed them down, they sunk roots into the floors. The posters left their shadows on the lime green walls and clung on more desperately than before. Maybe, I was growing a little old too. Most definitely, I was settling.

That was when I decided that the only arrangement left was for me to leave the room and start afresh. To put down everything I had and lead a life of permanent impermanence again. That led me to the United States. For me, the bedroom was never a shelter for self-preservation. It was a room full of possibilities, where I wandered on a journey of self-discovery through the ritual of arrangements.

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Written for Akiko’s Busch Reading Design class at D-Crit.