The Alsdorfs, the Cecil-Kirks, and Talk 20

Tom Kirk, my high school friend Grey's husband, kindly invited me to participate in a rather ingenious--though he said wholeheartedly copycat--program called Talk 20.  Periodically, his architecture firm, Bohlin, Cywinski, Jackson, invites eight or ten people to give talks in succession.  Each person gives 20 slides for 20 seconds each (6-7 minutes), so the whole program runs about an hour.  BCJ is known for many things, among them the Apple stores:

On the scheduled day in February, I took an early train to try to avoid a snowstorm, but once I got to Philadelphia the program was postponed for weather.  Grey had just had a second child, and her parents--my hosts in Birmingham on the book tour--were there too, so it turned into a big family visit.

Brigham, the architect who was organizing the program, could not have been nicer or more apologetic.  We rescheduled for the following month, and it all actually happened.


While killing time between the train and the talk, I sat in a coffee shop Brigham had recommended, where I couldn't help but try to recreate the Bar at the Folies Bergere painting:

Now I realize how different the painting actually looks:

Arriving at the firm, I met up with Tom (pictured below) and Brigham, who showed me all the plans for the new Williams library.

The firm had a happy hour beforehand, at which I met this collaborator of Tom's:

She asked how we knew each other and we both paused -- me because I think in the workplace the person who actually works there should get to tell any personal stories -- and this caused her to tease Tom in an almost British way, seeking innuendo with missile clarity.  Here's a sense of the place, and the party:

(I'm pretty sure I own exactly this chair (a Modernica replica of an Aalto) but in red.)

We spent most of the time talking to my fellow presenter -- also a friend and invitee of Tom -- named Arika Okrent.  She wrote a book called In the Land of Invented Languages (that I am reading now and keep recommending to people).

BCJ was founded in Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania which, by coincidence is also the hometown of my first art history professor from college who knows a couple of the partners.  I seem to thrive on this sort of small world connectedness.  In this picture, Brigham, who also MC'ed, is in the back left corner, with Bernie, the partner who gave an introduction and a synthesis at the end.

Here's how it all began.  They would tee up someone's powerpoint, look to the presenter, who'd call him or herself out of the starting blocks, and we would be off.  The slides were auto-timed to change over every twenty seconds, which can be surprisingly hard to judge precisely.  Most people seemed to have done what I had done, which was to have slides nearly entirely free of text.  Much easier to finesse the transitions of pictures.

As Bernie said to us speakers, "Once you are on the slope you can only get off at the bottom."  By the end, the biggest theme to me seemed to be about the limitations of invention and the pleasure of repair.

We were started off by an artist named Nora Chase who made abstracted works based on patterns in the human body.  They would be absolutely beautiful and fastidiously made, and then you would realize each square in the series was a different skin rash.

Arika summarized her book on invented languages as, "900 languages, 900 years, language wins."  This is, by the way, a cautionary tale for anyone who works at a company trying to create what is essentially a business language. She showed one slide of Charles Bliss, the founder of Bliss symbolics, a language of pictures meant to be universal.  It was, instead of being adopted by everyone, adopted by a facility for children with cerebral palsy, in Canada.  She talked about a feminist language with as many languages for menstruation as Eskimo words for snow (okay, they had six words).  She had fantastic photos of attending a Klingon conference.

The third guy was an extremely cerebral academic who was "reconciling poetics and ethics," and talking about a "science of imagination solutions."  My fravorite notion from it was (and this might come from Alfred Jarry-- I can't read my notes) in order to truly demolish something you have to demolish its ruins too.  You use the ruins to build beautiful new buildings.  

Also from my notes, "The best thing you can do for sustainable design is to make beautiful things people won’t want to tear down."  This may have come from the fourth speaker who talked about a building project in a remote Ecuadorian village, reachable by long bus ride, followed by three-hour canoe ride.

Jamie Montgomery, whose company is called FieldDesk, ended with a fantastic talk on repair. His charming refrain was, "Sometimes I feel mad, sometimes I feel lucky."  He would buy things that were broken that he knew he would need to repair (but he is lucky because he knows how to do it and therefore can buy nice things).  His motto might have been "Build well, well built."  And his goal was for everything he built to be "worthy of repair."  He spoke about the notion of wanting to make something right again.  "I want to feel my world is intelligible so I can respond to it."

He showed us how Tokyo phone poles are made for repair.  The bottom always rots out first and needs to be repaired.  There, the poles have joinery for the lower part to be detached and restored.  He showed us the men in his family's tendency to buy dilapidated log cabins (of the sort where you can hardly make out that it's a standing structure) and then to rebuild them.  He showed us how he re-shingled his roof.

Somehow, the combination of repair as a badge of honor, the impossibility of inventing a language from scratch, and the limitations of economic masterminding of art or museums all formed a hopeful vision of chaos, a deeply human imperfection, and an ability to right ships, to fix things, and to design them to stay around for a long time.  It's refreshing to think whistles and bells are only great when one needs an actual whistle or an actual bell, and that one wants the whistle or bell to be simple and well made.

Grey stayed home with the boys and we caught up the next day.  Here she is in their cheerful and beautiful kitchen with their littlest one.

And the family portrait:

In honor of the big brother, I create here a photo essay of his airplane collection.  These are for me to show to my brother, a lover and expert about planes, so he can help us ID the models:

The artist (aka big brother) at work:

On the way back, I was nearly dumbstruck by how calmly people queue for the train in Philadelphia.  Not in New York:

postscript: The Alsdorfs, Sarah and Bob, the tragically underdocumented (read: unphotographed) hosts of my book tour trip to Seattle, came to New York to visit their son Matt, my college friend.  We all went to the Whitney Biennial.  Judge Alsdorf (aka Bob) has a wonderful way of deadpanning titles to abstract sculptures that sound plausible, and are not at all true.  Here we are afterwards: