I undertook the English language copy editing for artist Alona Rodeh’s “Safe and Sound: The Third Dimension”, published
on the occasion of “Architecture of the Nights” at Erlangen’s Kunstpalais.
“I am tempted to invert one of the core questions that appeared in the event description: “Can architecture create a sense of community?” and instead reframe it as, “What kind of architecture can a sense of community create?”
I was the English language copy editor for the 2019 edition of transmediale, editing texts for programme materials, along with longer essays and contributions for the transmediale journal.
“Is the Bauhaus spirit now rendered at best irrelevant, at worst completely expired? It’s tempting to say yes on both counts—and to level a large part of the blame at platforms like Instagram that often divorce content from context.”
“In public space, the precise arrangement of bodies within the solar system of gossip—inner orbit: the talkers and listeners; secondary orbit: the onlookers and eavesdroppers—is largely determined by the backdrop. The physical architecture of a space molds the social architecture of gossip. Take, for example, the salon, the nail salon, and the office watercooler. Subconsciously or not, we use these spaces for chatter, and we preserve their gossip-facilitating designs when we build them anew.”
“This whirlwind of a welcome – the zeal, the readiness to adapt, the emphasis on the social – might also describe Kéré’s particularly grounded approach to architecture and life in general. The trajectory that led him from Gando, a village in his native Burkina Faso, to Germany is an extraordinary one; and yet, while not denying its importance and singularity, the architect prefers to view it as the result of luck, hard graft, and his own stubbornly-held brand of optimism.”
“The Hieronymus Journal is published by the Swiss firm Hieronymus Stationers AG, a brand dedicated to the high culture of paper and writing that sees itself in comfortable symbiosis with digital media. Taking time, to communicate by hand is about giving yourself time for a different kind of communication, it is not about falling out of time but giving the mind time for thought, for ourselves, and for others.”
“We live in challenging times. There is no denying that portents pertaining to the “end of the world” are writ large all around. Yet despite the implied drama of “apocalypse”, the reality is actually far more mundane and surviving it is not about building bunkers, […]
“An augmented reality app reveals an added text layer of email correspondence with personal subject lines like “mwwah” and “I wuv you”, which are not the usual diplomatic cable fare. Instead, the artist showcases the metanarrative of a workplace affair, another form of ‘revelation’ that lies, along with so many bigger secrets, among the 10,000+ documents. ”
“You could say that editors are similar to urban planners. Someone needs to be looking at the bigger picture, to join up the dots, to make each package of information a communication. More importantly, we need editors to help create pathways: routes in and through the information multiverse for both the reader and the subject matter.”
“Cusak’s description of his own Hinterhof (courtyard), where the quotidian rhythms of neighbours-never-met ricochet off the walls will be familiar to residents and AirBnB guests alike. Describing Maybachufer’s bustling market, Udo Noll cites similarities in a 1929 Franz Hessel text about the same spot, revealing the capacity for soundscapes, and the human routine that informs them, to endure beyond their associated landscapes – even in this city.”
“Both artists explore these inherent tensions against the backdrop of regeneration and consumerism in Kolkata and Los Angeles – two urban centres whose boundaries are continually rendered obsolete by the processes of sprawl and migration. […] In both projects, the architecture of the artists’ respective locations is heavily referenced, both in terms of their materiality and the imaginaries they serve.”
