Ode to FUTURA

If you've been paying any attention at all to the layout of this blog (okay, that's about two of you, including me), you've hopefully noted that the typography has just changed. And if you are at all passionate about fonts (typefaces to the uninitiated) as I am, and if you appreciate rigor and minimalism (again as I do) then you are doubtless a member of the cult of FUTURA, the greatest of all Modern typefaces.

In the world of fonts, you have two main divisions: serif and non-serif. Serifs are the fine, arching end elements that give traditional fonts much of their character.

The great serif fonts are named after their creators, Garamond (think traditional and bookish), Bodoni (think of any fashion rag or anything in them) and Caslon (think of adverts for any staggeringly expensive upscale English traditional whatever, though M. Caslon was French).

Then there are the non-serifs, modern typefaces lacking such calligraphic embellishments, and standing head-and-shoulders above all other non-serif fonts is FUTURA, the Zeus on the Mons Olympus of the font universe. (No, the name is not all-caps, but it simply looks so beautiful when presented so.)

FUTURA was created by the German typographer Paul Renner, inspired by the pure geometries of Bauhaus design. The original font, released by the Bauer Type Foundry in 1927, was supplemented by Renner in 1930, 1932 and again in 1933. The infamous Extra Bold, Madison Avenue's mainstay for a half-century and counting, was designed by Edwin Shaar and released in 1952.

FUTURA's cult status is due to the incisive clarity of Renner's design, based upon the simplicity of archetypal geometrical forms: the circle, square and triangle. Renner took extraordinary care in crafting each letter, and though the design seemingly is based on pure geometrical forms, even the capital "O" is slightly ovoid. Likewise, the stroke-weight is nearly uniformly even, and this when combined with the nearly pure geometry gives FUTURA its distinctive rigor, but again Renner took particular care to vary the thickness slightly from element to element to please the eye.

Finally, the lowercase letters have almost exaggeratedly tall ascenders, rising even above the line of the capitals, which makes them the most idiosyncratic element of FUTURA's design. Their uniqueness is redoubled by the nearly pure circularity of the c, d, e, g, o and p, an a priori design element which determined the unusual character of the lowercase letters, and which makes lowercase FUTURA text appear to be at least 2 points smaller than other fonts.

Here is a short video appreciation of FUTURA, well worth 2 minutes of your time:




FUTURA has from the outset, and today still maintains, an enormous success and a near-ubiquitous usage in all graphic media. After nearly a century, it remains among the most highly coveted fonts and is distributed on the web under license by Adobe's typekit.

As well it should, as it is pure genius.

The Potocki palaces

We have had the great good fortune to create commissioned portraits of two exceptional palaces, the first in Lviv (Ukraine) and in now in Paris, legacies of the renowned Potocki family, ancient and influential Polish nobles, comparable to the Stroganoffs of Russia and the Rohans of France. (Below, Jacques-Louis David's famed equestrian portrait of Count Stanisław Kostka Potocki, which the painter later recycled for Napoléon.)

The family's history is inextricably enmeshed with that of Poland, and unfurls a staggering procession of statesmen, generals and magnates stretching back to the 10th century. Until the calamity of World War II befell Poland, the family's several branches held over forty major town palaces, châteaux and manors and controlled over a quarter of the country's territory. In comparison, the French Bourbons appear dilettantes in the domain of architectural patronage. Today former Potocki properties are found from Georgia and the Ukraine in the east to Paris in the west, and several notable examples are illustrated at the end of this post.

Above is our freshly completed elevation of the Hôtel Potocki, built in 1884 by the architect Jules Reboul, which stands at 27 avenue Friedland in Paris's 8th arrondissement. The hôtel was among the grandest town palaces built in Paris in the late 19th century, designed in the neo-Louis XIV style that defined the era, its central, square-planned dome evoking the Tuileries palace and its column screens recalling the Enveloppe of Versailles.

The Potocki family was admired in Paris for their remarkable generosity to their countrymen and for their extensive charity works; for example, they erected the church of Corpus Christi on donated land adjoining the hôtel during its construction. The dependencies, formerly located on rue Châteaubriand and today destroyed, were renowned for their stables, which featured 38 mahogany horse stalls with rose marble watering troughs and some fifty grooms on permanent call.

Heirs sold the hôtel to the Paris Chamber of Commerce in 1923, which carried out two campaigns of renovations, the second in the early 1930s employing the era's foremost talents: renowned art-déco decorator and ébeniste Jacques-Émile Ruhlmann, the silversmiths Christofle (which executed the remarkable monumental bronze door seen in the detail at top), the sculptor Joseph Bernard and the interior decorator Jules Leleu.

The watercolor itself is a vast miniature, well over a yard long, and required months to execute. One number stands out: 1364, which is the number of window panes drawn and painted.

Below is our earlier watercolor depicting the former Potocki Palace in Lviv, today a residence of the president of the Ukraine.

Other former Potocki residences include the "Versailles of Poland," Wilanów Palace,

the beautiful Łańcut Castle near Rzeszow, Poland,

and its handsome orangerie,

the neoclassical jewel of Natolin on the outskirts of Warsaw,

the Potocki Palace, Warsaw,

the magnificent neoclassical Potocki Palace in Tulchyn, today the Ukraine,

the Potocki Palace in Radzyń,

the Italianate Krzeszwicke Palace, today in disrepair,

and the heartbreakingly dilapidated Potocki Palace in Zhjulojul, today in the Ukraine.

Again, just a sampling of a remarkable architectural heritage.

Ooh la la! Le Met goes Louvre

Tiens! Dis donc. Just a few weeks ago, posting on the absurdity of planting the Eiffel Tower, we'd taken aim at the Met as well for the shabby way it has (mis-)treated its monumental beaux-arts façade, using it as a glorified laundry-line since the days of Thomas Hoving.

Clearly others have been thinking the same thing as well, most important among them the person writing a check for the $60-odd million it will cost to renovate the 4-block-long strip of the Museum's Fifth Avenue street frontage: the 0.01% of the 1%, multigazillionaire David Koch.

Pandering to barely conceivable wealth, the NY Times article leads you to believe that Koch was the one who had the Eureka! moment, after he'd seen the renovated fountain at Lincoln Center, and that the project sprang from his imagination like Venus from Saturn's brow.

Apparently not quite. The Times also reported (below the fold, of course) that Emily Rafferty, the Met's president, had been looking for a donor for years. And years. (Echoes of Saint Simon, who wrote how the Sun King's architect, Jules Hardouin-Mansart, always planted an obvious error in his plans so that Louis XIV could point it out, and then he would profess astonishment that he himself had not seen it and praise the king for his penetrating eye, thereby leading him wherever he wanted. Plus ça change...)

So, thank you Mr. Koch for the check, thank you Ms. Rafferty for your persistence and evident fund-raising skills. And what exactly does one get for $60 not-nearly-as-big-as-they-used-to-be ones these days?

Pretty much what the Louvre got a decade ago (less the glass pyramid, the upscale underground shopping mall, and Dan Brown and Tom Hanks). The planning was done by the Philadelphia-based landscape design firm OLIN, who have also renovated other important Manhattan public spaces, Bryant Park and Columbus Circle.

To paraphrase another of Saint Simon's anecdotes, this one when Louis XIV asked Le Notre what he thought of Hardouin-Mansart's work in the gardens of Marly, "Hire a landscaper and you get a landscape." Gone are those triste 70s lozenge-shaped fountains stranded amid acres of pink granite, like the pompous afterthoughts they were. We now will have, as of 2014, two large, square I.M. Pei/Louvresque fontaines flanking the steps before the William Morris Hunt main façade, and beyond them pairs of square bosquets of untrimmed London plane trees with seating beneath, just as you'd find in the Tuileries gardens.

Fronting the outer McKim, Mead & White end pavilions, which project farthest toward Fifth Avenue, we get long allées of iconic clipped lindens redolent of the Champs-Elysées and the gardens of Le Notre. And we get café seating with rollout awnings just like you get all over Paris (though you'll probably be tasered if you try to smoke while sipping your Chardonney there).

We don't want to quibble here—after all, who doesn't like a tree?—and we rather like the bustle that will result from the shoe-horned fountains and bosquests-cum-food courts, and are amused by the provocation of Descartean plotted, poodle-clipped and tortured trees appearing in Manhattan, but must note that the allées are far too close to the buildings (well, truth be told everything is far too crammed and far too close to the buildings, but hey, it's New York). Clearly though, this idea of disengaging important public monuments from their surroundings is about as dead as classical architecture itself, and we doubt that even Mr. Koch is wealthy and influential enough to buy and raze the four blocks facing the Met to Madison Avenue (Park would be ideal) and get the job done right. He shouldn't feel too badly though; even the Sun King was forced to content himself with a rump front yard for the Louvre, unable to dislodge some very stubborn clerical holdouts in the the church of St-Germain l'Auxerrois.

Hopefully the Met will also take another cue from the Tuileries and not max out on the Au Bon Pain kiosks but also find a few appropriate spots for public sculpture as well.

Curiously, and against all current French practice, the Met wishes to encourage use of secondary entrances accessible at the plaza level. This flies in the face of French logic, which holds that the larger and more important the public building and the greater the attendance, the fewer entrances should be open because only two security guards can be afforded in the operating budget, though massive amounts can be spent on the design of monumental doors that will never be used.

(Below, the Opéra Bastille's grandiose entrance 20 minutes before the opening curtain, and the Louvre's solution of how to enliven its vast inner court.)

If the architect has for some reason included more than two doors, as is often the case, they are best condemned with these plastic chains (approved by the fire inspectors, apparently as they will quickly melt in case of a serious conflagration), and visitors are to be herded with bicycle-stand barriers, neither of which any public building in Paris worth its sel de mer can ever have enough of.

If the Met really wants to go the whole nine metres here, we'd highly recommend they close off the main stairs with a few dozen yards of plastic chain and route all visitors via a makeshift labyrinth through any random entrance they see fit, chosen in a weekly lottery held by their maintenance staff.

At night, the Met's façade will now be lit by low-energy LED lights, instead of spots from across the street, just as in the Louvre's stunning Cour Carrée. All in all, a consummately pleasant, coherent and inviting plan that will turn the Met's Fifth Avenue frontage into the world's longest sidewalk café.

Unfortunately, Mayor Bloomberg has refused the Met's proposal to flood Fifth Avenue in the 80s and replace the M4 bus with MTA-run bâteaux-mouches.

No mention is made of gendarmes on roller blades or motionless street mimes or roving bands of fiercely cool fashionistas or bad accordian interpretations of Piaf or even if Woody Allen will be lurking about, but surely these necessary if minor clichés will not be forgotten to ensure the Met's complete francophilic transformation.

We'd only point out one inexcusable faux pas that gives the whole game away: those ridiculously suburban foundation plantings, pasted against a classical limestone façade that runs nearly ¼ mile long.

Tellement américain.

Elegant Trash

Sometimes, all too rarely for most of us, you have an Eureka! flash of inspiration and a wonderful insight is handed you. One of our favorite watercolors, New York City Trash Basket (created in 2003 for our exhibition Central Park at Didier Aaron, Inc. in Manhattan) was one such moment and we wanted to share the image and the story behind it here—if only to prove that we are after all contemporary artists, despite occasional protestations to the contrary!

We created a number of life-sized elevational watercolors for the Central Park show (here is a link to the NY Times review), the largest among them being well over a yard long or high. The idea behind the show was to make an æsthetic departure from our detailed historical elevations: to render objects and architectural details in the park with our usual attention to realism while presenting them at the scale of contemporary art. (Below, a life-sized one-point perspective of a marble vase at the Mall in the gallery.)

We particularly sought subjects that would translate into graphic images with an immediate visual impact, and when we came across one of these iconic wire-mesh trash baskets while scouting the park—as former New Yorkers, it is as evocative of Manhattan as one of Proust's madeleines—we had one of those ahah! moments.

Measurements and photos were duly taken and back in Paris the drawing was plotted out and rendered and, despite the unanticipated scale of the effort those few words gloss over (it seems always to be the case), the results did not disappoint. (The original watercolor is over a yard high, so do imagine an image exactly as big as the real thing.)

For the gallery etiquette we wrote:

Overlooked and overflowing, bent and abused and often obscured by black plastic liners, the ubiquitous New York City trash basket is found throughout Central Park. The minimalist geometry of its design embodies the dictum that form follows function and strikes the eye particularly by what is absent. The simple wire skein defines the void it surrounds and generates elegant geometry reminiscent both of Paolo Uccello's famed Renaissance explorations of perspective and the Op Art movement. And certainly the Warholian subject also evokes Pop Art. It comes as a slight shock that such beauty harbors Manhattan's refuse.

More prosaically, the watercolor depicts the Standard Expanded Metal Waste Basket, model #MO5539500 black, designed in the early 1980s by Corcraft Products of the NY State Department of Corrections and manufactured by the female inmates of the Albion state prison. Later, vertical re-enforcement bars were added as the mesh had a tendency to squash over time from the baskets being tossed back in place from the backs of sanitation trucks (as New Yorkers with windows facing the street all know, this basket-toss is best done at dawn).

Once we'd hung it among the other watercolors in the gallery, the Trash Basket became the mascot of the exhibition and was purchased by the New-York Historical Society for their permanent collection. In 2009 it was included in their exhibition, Drawn by New York, and we were bowled over to find that it had been hung at the very end of the enfilade of galleries, the culmination point of six centuries of works on paper depicting New York.

Today, this trash basket has been almost entirely replaced by a new, uglier design that nonetheless better survives the rigors of hanging out day and night on NYC street corners. But we are happy to report that new examples this classic design are still to be found within the park itself, the last bastion of elegant trash.

Eco-terrorism alert! The Eiffel Tower, world's largest garden trellis?

A serious project is under development to plant the Eiffel Tower, with work to begin as early as June if the Paris city council votes its approval, reported Le Figaro newspaper and CNN.

600,000 plants, sacks of growing medium and watering tubes together weighing 378 tons would be attached to the 1073-foot tall structure in a $96 million plan overseen by the Ginger engineering firm, Vinci Construction and the architect Claude Bucher.

Apparently the plants are already being raised in nurseries and a reduced-scale model of the tower has been built over a period of two years in a Paris suburb to test the idea's feasibility. The plants would be left to grow on the tower for four years, to be removed in 2016.

That in a nutshell is what is being reported, and it's hard to know where to start when faced with such monumental decadence, but let's begin at the beginning of the radical idea that urban structures can and should be a garden, which takes us, surprisingly, to Vienna in the mid-1980s and the Hundertwasser Haus, designed by the Viennese artist of the same name.

A piebald ode to the romanticized Teutonic vision of das Leben alternativ (or the counterculture) painted in a bright de Stijl palette, the idiosyncratic Viennese apartment block features a literal roof garden, trees planted in living rooms and undulating floors ("an uneven floor is a melody to the feet"). Both urban folly and provocation, the Hundertwasser Haus was a manifesto celebrating rustic handcraft and whimsical impracticality at a time of slick commercial atria sheathed in polarized glass sheltering rows of ficus trees, the iconic Trump Tower (below, the pink marble and polished brass atrium) being the apex—or nadir—of the trend.

More recently, the Parisian urban eco-gardener Patrick Blanc has been creating "vertical gardens" and gained great notoriety with his 2005 project at the Quai Branly Museum of First Peoples in Paris (below). Blanc, who obviously knows his plants, perfected the system of growing plants in pouches of planting medium irrigated by nutrient-rich water carried by a skein of drip lines.

Spectacularly lush and visually compelling, Blanc's sensuously cascading plant walls have become enormously popular with corporate clients wanting to make an eco-friendly statement with maximum visual impact. They are beautiful and truly stunning... and oh-so trendy. Affixed to a bare wall, as below, these vertical gardens can make a compelling statement and add immeasurable beauty, and quite simply are wonderful and nearly wondrous additions to most urban spaces, period.

But. Ah yes, there is always that "but," and in this case it's a big one: But the Eiffel Tower?

Is this eco- or ego-gardening? What madness possesses people to want to turn one of the most famous engineering feats of the 19th century, the symbol of France, into the world's largest scaffold for plants, which can after all be grown just about anywhere else? Why isn't this massive investment of time and resources being used to create, say, an innovative garden in Paris, instead of disfiguring and possibly weakening a great historical landmark?

Well, these are all rhetorical questions; you certainly know. That particular madness is of course trendiness. Fashion. Cool. Thinking one is right-thinking. And not a little bit of free-floating arrogance and self-referential decadence (BoBo nombrilisme, or "bohemian bourgeoisie navel staring" as it's known here). A corrosive brew indeed, and it is no surprise that this is occurring in Paris, world capital of fashion and when, for the first time, the younger generations have become bored with their past—a true sea change in France's self conception.

It is also proof that the 20th century's mental stupidity (for it is not even worthy of the word mentality) in treating the great monuments of our ancestors with disdain is alive and well and actually thriving. The poster child for that is of course the late Penn Station in Manhattan. In France, it is le feu Les Halles (below), the grandiose, old central market torn down under Pompidou (who suffered from Manhattan envy) to make way for a massive underground metro and suburban-train hub and a shopping mall with—you guessed it—hideously cheap atria lined with ficus trees. The White Hole, it is unaffectionately called here. Inevitably, it was so awful and so badly constructed that it is now being razed and replaced with a trendy new eco-friendly shopping mall, which will carry it along for another 40 years.

Other, lesser desecrations include Daniel Buren's infamous Two Platforms installation of 1986 in the courtyard of the Palais-Royal, home of the Ministry of Culture, and the more recent wrapping of the handsome beaux-arts-meets-art-deco façade of the old Louvre Department Store in aluminum spaghetti à la Cy Twombly, also perpetrated by the Culture ministry when it purchased and renovated the property to serve as an annex.

But Paris hardly stands alone here. A perfect American example of people-who-should-know-better-but-don't is the staff of Metropolitan Museum of Art, which since the late seventies (under go-go Tom Hoving) has seen fit to use its monumental beaux-arts façade as a banner support, even though there are flag poles in the plazas to either side that would be perfect for the purpose. One can only hope that the Met, trapped in 70s æsthetic amber with its pop-art colored banners, tired M® shopping bags and chunky tubular brass handrails, will bring itself into the 21st century responsibly and not plant its celebrated landmark façade but rather reveal and light it properly. (They might also—though no rush as it's only been a century or so now—finally get around to commissioning someone to carve those stacks of limestone piled atop the cornice into something resembling art, seeing as it is an art museum and not that poor.)

As for the Eiffel Tower, it has been used as a billboard for at least two decades now. First it was bathed with colored lights at night, copying the Empire State Building, then it received a dazzling star-like light-show for the millenium which sparkled for the first ten minutes of every hour (truly inspired, but apparently opening Pandora's box), and in 2008 (below) it became a propaganda poster for the ill-fated EU constitution, reduced to the Lisbon treaty. It has also been decorated to promote other such political ventures.

Now it may well become the world's largest trellis frame and most expensive and inefficient "carbon trap," to go with the French government's dubious obsession with the real carbon trap, carbon taxes.

"To the glory of France!"