I was looking at film clips of Anna May Wong on YouTube. She was one of the actors featured in Hollywood Party (1937), a short film of a garden party with a Chinese theme, held to raise funds for the Kuomintang. I was surprised to see the US comedian Charley Chase arrive at the party driving a mock Dymaxion car. I didn’t realize that Buckminister Fuller’s invention had seeped into popular culture to that extent by 1937.
London: St. George’s (Nicholas Hawksmoor); St. Mary Woolnoth (Nicholas Hawksmoor); British Museum (renovation by Norman Foster); a post modern bank building (perhaps by Leon Krier?); Gherkin (Norman Foster); Lloyds building (Richard Rogers); Christ Church (Nicholas Hawsmoor); Gilbert and George’s house, Fournier Street, Spitalfields; Gilbert and George shopping at Spitalfields Market; Sherlock Holmes statue in Baker Street; Portsmouth Harbour (2 images); Richard Lancelyn Green’s Sherlock Holmes collection at City Museum, Portsmouth (2 images); Reconstruction of a typical 1950s English living room at City Museum, Portsmouth; St. Pancras Station (William Barlow); National Gallery (addition by Robert Venturi); St. Martins in the Fields (James Gibbs); John Soane Museum (renovation by John Soane); Big Ben (Charles Barry); London Eye (Mark Barfield); Sherlock Holmes pub; British Library at St. Pancras (Colin St. John); Millenium Bridge (Norman Foster); St. Paul’s (Christopher Wren). Tibilisi: House; Brickwork; Shoe repairer’s sign; Graffiti; Cafe; Balcony; Coke advertisement; Mtskheta, the old capital of Georgia; Old churches near Mtskheta (2 images). London again (Kew Gardens): Chinese Pagoda (William Chambers); Temperate House and Palm House (both by Decimus Burton, 3 images). Minneapolis: My buddy, sculptor Andrew Leicester. Rochester NY: Clock of Nations (Dale Clark); Highland Park Diner (2 images); my mentor Karal Ann Marling’s house.
London
Portsmouth
London
Tbilisi/Republic of Georgia
London
Minneapolis
Rochester
I’ve designed a couple of brick walls for the apprentice bricklayers at Holmesglen TAFE to build. One is based on eating a vanilla slice and the other is based on Tintin’s rocket in Destination Moon by Hergé.
Apprentice bricklayer Brett who built the Vanilla Slice Wall
Students in my Popular Art, Architecture and Design class also designed some brick walls for the bricklaying apprentices at Holmesglen to build. Here is a small sample of them:
James Bond Wall—Brendon Pope
Abbey Road Wall—Mohamad Khalid
Super Mario Wall—Ai Ci Lo
Scary Wall—Joanne Nataprawira
Music Wall—Melika Mehdizadeh
Red Violin—Melika Mehdizadeh
The Joker/Heath Ledger Wall—Sandalie Seneviratne
Gift-Box Wall—Takuya Matatsumoto
Michael Jackson’s Feet—Kathryn Ko
Hitting a Brick Wall—Georgie Stokes
Optical Illusion—Marc Cheeng Ming Ern
Following is the front cover for my next book, Victims and Villains: Barbie and Ken Meet Sherlock Holmes, and the text for the back cover. It will be published by Ramble House (www.ramblehouse.com) later this year.
BARBIE’S DEAD, at last!
On March 9, 2009, the infamous Barbie doll turned 50. As for her companions, the curiously asexual Ken and the forgettable Skipper (what kind of name is that for one’s baby sister, anyway?), nobody seems inclined to bake cakes with candles for either one of them. Barbie’s the star, at least for feminists and professors with time on their hands who have argued ad infinitum that this doll is turning our daughters into prepubescent sex maniacs, enthralled by her perky and anatomically impossible physique. But less hysterical researchers have recently noticed that little girls don’t seem at all inclined to emulate Barbie. They do, instead, hack off her oh-so-perfect hair, melt her dainty fingers over purloined cigarette lighters, and generally use her and her cohorts as subjects for grisly acts of mayhem. Kill them! And make ‘em suffer.
The innocence of childish impulses toward the dastardly is, of course, the real charm of Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories. Hanging. Stabbing. Poisoning. Death by snake. One poor fellow even “blanched.” To read the most famous of Holmes adventures through at a sitting only increases one’s admiration for the ingenuity of the author who finds such varied and engaging ways of tumbling his victims into the hereafter. How much more gruesome pleasure is thus afforded by the sight of Barbie and company done to death over and over again in living color and three dimensions. It’s almost as delightful as spending an afternoon mutilating Barbie—or the truly dreadful Ken—with lighters and scissors! Sex? A passing fancy. Violence? Ah, that’s the ticket!
Karal Ann Marling
Professor Emerita, American Studies and Art History
University of Minnesota
I was very sad to learn of the death of John Michell, the eccentric ‘Dr Who-like’ author of many books on geomancy and sacred geometry. I corresponded with him when I was doing my Masters on building ceremonies in the early 1980s, inviting him to give a lecture at the University of Minnesota in 1984. When I picked John up at the airport, he had a brown paper bag full of clothes and a suitcase full of books. His lecture at the university was the best … and the worst. He needed a heliograph (?), and when I asked him what that was he said after a moment’s thought, ‘A toaster for books’. And he was absolutely right! The spine of the book he was projecting broke, the extreme heat melted the glue, and the in-built fan blew the pages out of the machine one after the other while he was speaking. It was hilarious! But John wasn’t fazed one bit. He stayed in our tiny one-bedroom flat in Minneapolis for a couple of days, and there were stories galore concerning that. For instance, he slept in the nude, blanket-less, on our sofa, waking very late, while we woke early and had to ‘divert our eyes’ as we tip-toed around him! Then in 1992, when I was doing my PhD and flat broke, I stayed with him for a few day in London (his house was just around the corner from the Portobello Road Market) and he was an extremely gracious host. What a colourful character John was!
Just back from the Popular Culture Association’s conference in New Orleans. There were two architectural highlights for me. Located on the edge of the city’s warehouse precinct is the Piazza D’Italia (1978), an icon of postmodern architecture. Designed by U.S. architect Charles Moore (water spouts out of his mouth and into the map-of-Italy-shaped fountain), it is a real gem. I also visited New Orlean’s 9th district, which was devastated by hurricane Katrina. If it wasn’t for the admirable efforts of Brad Pitt, whose foundation ‘Make It Right’ is constructing several new houses in the area, I don’t think very much rebuilding would be going on. There are still lots of wrecked and abandoned houses there, which is a bit depressing.
Piazza D’Italia
Reconstructing New Orlean’s 9th District
Jerzy Faczynski (1917-1995) was a Polish architect who migrated to England in 1939. He is perhaps best remembered for writing Studies in Polish Architecture (1946) and designing St. Mary’s Roman Catholic Church in Leyland (1964). He was also an inveterate scribbler and recently hundreds of his sketches have come on the market, often selling for only a couple of dollars apiece. Here are three delightful ‘post modern’ sketches by him.
Last week I attended the annual Popular Culture Association conference in San Francisco. I also visited San Jose to see the Sarah Winchester House, which was built by the widow of the gun manufacturer to appease/confuse the spirits of those killed by Winchester rifles during the Indian and Civil wars. It has 160 rooms and includes a staircase that leads nowhere and doors and windows that open onto blank walls. But the visual highlight of San Jose for me was the 1950s vintage ‘Pure Pork Sausage’ sign near the railway station.