Song Lyric: Light Therapy

“Happiness of Returning,” 1915, by Giorgio de Chirico.

Whatever winter stole

Left me colorless and cold,

Like deChirico in light therapy.

Is there something more than this Night?

Maybe we are not our own light.

Think of the beginnings never begun,

Their future done. A frozen dawn.

That seeing-eye sun the only one

Left in light therapy.

Is there something more than this Night?

Maybe we are not our own light.

The clouds show their bruise,

the sky’s blue tattoos.

The blind spot spies

are slipping through:

There is something more in this life.

I feel you, you’re less than particle waves,

Like unseen hands. Or a bright breath of grace.

We are not our own light.

Figure Painting: Nicole Eisenman’s Another Green World

Nicole Eisenman, “Another Green World,” 2015, Collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art

I’m inspired by paintings, and by painters as well. They can express a cultural moment, a zeitgeist in two dimensions that always aims for more. They know what came before in painting and they offer up what they don’t know but believe is coming after. Each generation gets to rediscover the landscape, the abstract, the figure.

I was thinking of that famous Mark Rothko quote: “A painting is not a picture of an experience, but it is the experience”— for him, the path into that experience was using color to bury light and space into the picture plane and reveal the deeper mind. A psychology even. Lately I’ve been drawn to looking at figures in space, and more importantly noticing the space between them. I see figures on sidewalks in parks, bodies moving underwater in pools, people reluctantly socially-distanced indoors, or gathering freely on outdoor terraces. The Covid pandemic has put literal distance as well as a psychological space between us. It has been exhausting and ironically, a little claustrophobic in the way we have had to retreat from each other physically.

Reading a piece on the painter Nicole Eisenman in the New Yorker, I was struck by her painting “Another Green World” and the figures in it. She paints a house-party scene: figures crowd on the couch and around the charcuterie on the wooden table, spilling out onto the terrace. Someone is at the door; there is barely any space but come in, there’s always room for one more. Each figure is painted with not just an identifiable body but a personality with a color temperature and ambient light. It is not the sublime ‘oneness’ of Rothko. The painting is a plurality, a city, many pulses, many voices that embrace, kiss, flirt, relax into each other’s presence. They are curious, we want to know these people, be seen by them, move through them, grab a red cup and introduce ourselves. Even the introverted facet of ourselves is ready to watch what is about to happen.

Because we are in the painting already: holding the red cup under the disco ball; we are blue, kissing the topless woman; we are glowing and unknowable, sitting on the back of the sofa; we are reading the liner notes to the Brian Eno album, (from which the painting takes its name) a little flushed from the second beer.

The painting is an ensemble, everyone is important, and that togetherness is what I remember like a nostalgia, and look forward to again. It feels like an intimate reveal even if someone is buried under the coats in the sleeping loft and your friend is sitting on the floor, unable to put his phone down.

I have taken enough art history classes that a part of my brain wants to analyze: are the figures representational of painterly movements (Fauvism? Gauguin? Munch? Francis Bacon? Blue Picasso?) Should we compare and contrast to other party scenes (Renoir’s Luncheon of the Boating Party? Matisse’s Joy of Life? How about Toulouse Lautrec’s At the Moulin Rouge?) No, let’s not. We’re fine hanging out here. We haven’t been out in so long, we don’t need to go anywhere else. Hey, We’ve missed you too. You look great. Really.

Architecture: Louisville and Smart Growth in the Modern Agrarian Landscape

How should a piece of land, once wilderness, then field, evolve and grow into an integral part of a community? This project, The Upton Oxmoor, sits within the historic Oxmoor Farm, a 3,000 acre estate first surveyed in 1774. The parcel precedes the Revolution and even the statehood of Kentucky. The area still retains its rural agrarian context despite the intrusion of interstate highways and shopping malls; the original farmhouse is now a rich site of the state’s history. The architectural design attempted to make connections to the architectural farmhouse context and to the land and its farming past. The idea of placemaking in the 21st century without erasing the past was important: progress and urban development tracks a transect from rural/agrarian to village/sub-urban in this area, and care needs to be given to re-invent apartment communities so that a pervasive sameness does not dominate the landscape or the language of the architecture.

The architecture sets up a modern agrarian typology, taking cues from the layout and scale of a farmstead: the main house, the barn, the stables, the outparcel buildings together form a working community. This project attempts something similar, but in a contemporary way:

* A pair of blue modern ‘barns,’ with standing seam metal roofs and birdsmouth hayloft detailing, become the main architectural statement (and the tallest element, at four stories);

* A single elevated concrete slab creates two parking levels that ‘corral’ the cars in the center of the project, convenient and unobtrusive for the residents, but hidden from the more scenic views on the periphery of the site;

* A paired-gable form organizes the scale and massing of the apartment houses, allowing a more contemporary roof pitch to set the tone for the high contrast white and bronze walls; with nine buildings arranged in a square, their paired gables create a farmstead village identity.

* The apartment buildings are ‘pulled apart,’ offering skybridges that bring light into the corridors and breaking up large buildings into better-scaled ones. This architectural action also creates many more corner units than a project typically has.

* The residents move in the pedestrian ‘street’ between the parking and the buildings, connecting them to each other and the amenities in the clubhouse building at the front and encouraging a sense of community. These smaller areas are designed as gathering places, with strategic amenities such as fire pits, lawn games, built in granite grilles, and seating all encourage meeting one’s neighbors.

The Upton Oxmoor today.

Literal and formal borrowing of the barn forms, reinterpreted for contemporary housing.

After touring the nearly finished project, we went to shoot sporting clays across the Ohio River in New Albany, Indiana. Their barn was an affirmation of sorts. Yes, You stole from the right places.

The double barrel Italian shotgun I used. Evidently this can be an expensive hobby.

Transect of the evolution of rural land to urban, taken from Garden Cities: Theory and Practice of Agrarian Urbanism

Evolution of farmlands into villages can be planned or unplanned.

Site plan.

Early aerial study.

A warm, vague, optimistic image from our competition entry.

Rendering.