In general, I say let GM tank. They have not kept current. A bail out to keep doing business as usual? I don't think so.
But let's look at GM's assets.
-It has huge manufacturing infrastructure - buildings, machines, networks of providers. There is a huge capital investment in this company.
-It has a tremendous intellectual capital. It has decades of experienced designers, managers, and manufacturing personnel. As a designer, my heart aches when I think about the loss of this capital. People with skill and imagination sidelined by regressive upper management.
What to do?
In WWII, these industries went to work building trucks and tanks and fighters and bombers. What do we need now?
-Massive quantities of wind turbines, tide turbines, hydro power and other ways of harnessing the kinetic energy of the earth to produce "clean cheap electrons." GM needs to put its core strength of manufacturing complex large machines to work solving the climate crisis.
-Toyota is building manufactured housing. This concept is accepted in Japan, and there is a great deal of innovation. Buckminster Fuller had this concept with his Dymaxion House. The contemporary manufactured house need have no resemblance to the double wide or the trailer home. Americans have an unimaginative prejudice against the concept. The manufactured housing made by GM should be highly efficient and completely green.
GM has the seeds of its resurrection, it has probably thought of them and discounted them years ago. It has relentlessly followed a narrow focus, rather than being the leader and innovator that it was at its founding. If it cannot change its course and innovate its way towards solvency without a massive taxpayer bailout, then let it die.
08 March 2009
19 February 2009
Form Poems, Autodidactic Drawings, Useless Drawings
The great gift of architecture is its ability to create worlds. We value architecture’s utility, but we prize its ability to astonish. These drawings are a means of creating architecture. They have several names, for not one title describes them: Form Poems, autodidactic drawings, useless drawings. They are useless in that they have no immediate utility in the making of a building; they are autodidactic in that they are a means of self teaching; and they are poems in their desire to express, and seek to express an ineffable quality.
Every poem, it is said, should inculcate a moral; and by this moral is the poetical merit of the work to be adjudged… We have taken into our heads that to write a poem simply for the poem’s sake, and to acknowledge such to have been our design, would be to confess ourselves radically wanting in true Poetic dignity and force: - but the simple fact is, that, would we but permit ourselves to look into our own souls, we should immediately there discover that under the sun there neither exists nor can exist any work more thoroughly dignified – more supremely noble than this very poem – this poem per se – this poem which is a poem and nothing more – this poem written solely for the poem’s sake.
-Edgar Allen Poe
How are these drawings practice? As admittedly “useless” drawings, they have no utility in the making of buildings. Their object pointedly eschews any form of problem solving. They are selfish and personal. Yet as autodidactic drawings, they function to self-educate. They are generators of an architectural language that ultimately influence built work and teaching. But as Poe indicates above, these drawings, as Form Poems, do not seek to achieve a larger social good (unless, of course, we allow that the making of beautiful things is a social good). They are, for the most part, made solely for the drawing’s sake.
In my own case, the process is more or less unvarying. I begin with the glimpse of a form, a kind of remote island, which will eventually be a story or a poem. I see the end and I see the beginning, but not what is in between. That is gradually revealed to me, when the stars or chance are propitious. More than once, I have to retrace my steps by way of the shadows. I try to interfere as little as possible in the evolution of the work. I do not want it to be distorted by my opinions, which are the most trivial things about us. The notion of art as compromise is a simplification, for no one knows entirely what he is doing.
-Jorge Luis Borges
Borges describes a process that is recognizable to most that make. We have ideas that form in the mind that must be hammered out through testing using the tools at our disposal. In the case of the work collected here, it is drawing. The process involves becoming lost and discovering. The process requires erasure, iteration, labor. The process involves luck. The process of making as Borges describes it, and as I see it, is much like the surrealist practice of automatic drawing. Though logical rules for the making of form are employed, often there is no rational motivation for a form’s presence. The movement of the pencil, the presence of a figure are the result of intuition and conjecture.
There is a habit to making. The drawings herein are the product of a daily practice. The titles are the dates upon which they were drawn (year month day). As such they are akin to diary entries. There are gaps in the sequences as daily life overwhelms the creative discipline. Even so, there are close to 300 drawings produced over the last 2 years. The work contained herein constitutes a focus to explore, exploit, and potentially exhaust a single medium. The format is a 6” square of paper and graphite. Recent experiments have been in other media in an attempt to challenge habit, but the core focus is simple. When asked why he didn’t explore color in his photographs, my brother replied “I haven’t begun to scratch the surface of black and white.” Centuries of graphite drawings indicate that this work barely begins to exhaust the possibilities.
The word “poem” has its origins in ancient Greek as a term for something made, but usually in relation to words: a fiction. The relationship, therefore, between the poet and the architect in terms of what they do is a strong one. A poet is a “maker.” The architect makes. Both use a language (the poet: words; the architect: lines, tones, models, pixels) to call into existence that which is not there.
There is, however, a class of fancies, of exquisite delicacy, which are not thoughts, and to which, as yet, I have found it absolutely impossible to adapt language.
-Edgar Allen Poe
What is there to say? When the drawings are at their best, there is nothing to say.
Every poem, it is said, should inculcate a moral; and by this moral is the poetical merit of the work to be adjudged… We have taken into our heads that to write a poem simply for the poem’s sake, and to acknowledge such to have been our design, would be to confess ourselves radically wanting in true Poetic dignity and force: - but the simple fact is, that, would we but permit ourselves to look into our own souls, we should immediately there discover that under the sun there neither exists nor can exist any work more thoroughly dignified – more supremely noble than this very poem – this poem per se – this poem which is a poem and nothing more – this poem written solely for the poem’s sake.
-Edgar Allen Poe
How are these drawings practice? As admittedly “useless” drawings, they have no utility in the making of buildings. Their object pointedly eschews any form of problem solving. They are selfish and personal. Yet as autodidactic drawings, they function to self-educate. They are generators of an architectural language that ultimately influence built work and teaching. But as Poe indicates above, these drawings, as Form Poems, do not seek to achieve a larger social good (unless, of course, we allow that the making of beautiful things is a social good). They are, for the most part, made solely for the drawing’s sake.
In my own case, the process is more or less unvarying. I begin with the glimpse of a form, a kind of remote island, which will eventually be a story or a poem. I see the end and I see the beginning, but not what is in between. That is gradually revealed to me, when the stars or chance are propitious. More than once, I have to retrace my steps by way of the shadows. I try to interfere as little as possible in the evolution of the work. I do not want it to be distorted by my opinions, which are the most trivial things about us. The notion of art as compromise is a simplification, for no one knows entirely what he is doing.
-Jorge Luis Borges
Borges describes a process that is recognizable to most that make. We have ideas that form in the mind that must be hammered out through testing using the tools at our disposal. In the case of the work collected here, it is drawing. The process involves becoming lost and discovering. The process requires erasure, iteration, labor. The process involves luck. The process of making as Borges describes it, and as I see it, is much like the surrealist practice of automatic drawing. Though logical rules for the making of form are employed, often there is no rational motivation for a form’s presence. The movement of the pencil, the presence of a figure are the result of intuition and conjecture.
There is a habit to making. The drawings herein are the product of a daily practice. The titles are the dates upon which they were drawn (year month day). As such they are akin to diary entries. There are gaps in the sequences as daily life overwhelms the creative discipline. Even so, there are close to 300 drawings produced over the last 2 years. The work contained herein constitutes a focus to explore, exploit, and potentially exhaust a single medium. The format is a 6” square of paper and graphite. Recent experiments have been in other media in an attempt to challenge habit, but the core focus is simple. When asked why he didn’t explore color in his photographs, my brother replied “I haven’t begun to scratch the surface of black and white.” Centuries of graphite drawings indicate that this work barely begins to exhaust the possibilities.
The word “poem” has its origins in ancient Greek as a term for something made, but usually in relation to words: a fiction. The relationship, therefore, between the poet and the architect in terms of what they do is a strong one. A poet is a “maker.” The architect makes. Both use a language (the poet: words; the architect: lines, tones, models, pixels) to call into existence that which is not there.
There is, however, a class of fancies, of exquisite delicacy, which are not thoughts, and to which, as yet, I have found it absolutely impossible to adapt language.
-Edgar Allen Poe
What is there to say? When the drawings are at their best, there is nothing to say.
27 January 2009
04 April 2008
Here and There-May 1 to June 20, 2008
Here and There
Recent Work by Annie Coggan and
May 1 to June 20, 2008
Opening reception May 1, 2008 7:55 PM
Here and There has two meanings. Coggan and Crawford were based in
Annie Coggan
Walker Evans Builds a Chair
The American South is the genesis for the country’s most urgent problems as well as the well spring for the most vital narratives in our culture. Walker Evans’ photographs have been an inspiration in illustrating the often bereft environment and its most surrealistic potential. The exhibition is comprised of a series of chairs, which are an attempt to examine the surrealistic attitude and the “make-do,” “ad hoc,” and “do-it-yourself” culture of making and re-making in the south.
The maps are a method of drawing and model-making to show the places I’ve been to in and around my new home.
Form Poems/Form Politics
Form is inevitable in the visual arts. It is the language with which we, as artists, give voice to our ideas. Poetry and politics frame competing issues. Poetry is something mysterious, that ultimately goes beyond words or forms to an un-nameable. Politics is the art of engaging in discourse and persuasion. The great struggle is to find bridges between the poetic image and the political.
The Form Poems are part of an on-going project. Alternately referred to as autodidactic drawings, automatic drawings, and useless drawings, they are investigations into the narrative potential of form. Meanings are varyingly explicit, implicit and purely material and gestural. As “autodidactic” drawings, they are self-teaching tools; from constant experimentation comes invention. As “automatic” drawings they are clearly linked to surrealist practices; the drawings evolve intuitively and spontaneously. As “useless” drawings, they confront the utility of architectural drawings; these drawings have no use in the development of any particular architectural project.
About Annie Coggan and
Their early formative training in fine arts combined with their subsequent training as architects, and their engagement with architectural practice has led them towards a decidedly interdisciplinary approach to their work. Their work is rooted in the language and practices of architectural representation and production, yet questions accepted norms. Annie Coggan has a BFA from
For more about the work of Annie Coggan, see www.coggancrawford.com, and www.formpoetrypolitics.blogspot.com
About the Gestarc Gallery
Gestarc is a non profit gallery conceived, funded, built and operated by a group of five
The name is culled from the words ‘gesture’ and ‘architecture;’ two keynotes regarded as exciting modulators for the project development and intervention in spheres of the art, architecture and other. Per project basis, the Gestarc Group is intent on the use and the study of hidden notions referred to as ‘supplement-x’ or ‘x’. This has been and shall remain the contiguity of focus for the Gestarc generated work.
Work generated by other voices will be selected and shown with/ in its own independent vital stress, circumstances and media.
Located at
Red Hook,
www.gestarcgallery.com
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