Patrick Sisson - Writer, Journalist, Cultural Documentarian, Music Lover

PATRICK SISSON

The Challenges of Restoring Mies, Or the Search for the Right Shade of Black

Curbed Chicago
Feature
March 27, 2015

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The maxim “less is more” has become synonymous with Mies van der Rohe’s design approach, shorthand for the power of focusing on the pertinent details and the experience within a space. But for those tasked with repairing and restoring the architectural icon’s masterpieces, the phrase could easily refer to the amount of work they need to perform to bring modernist buildings back to their former glory. A cynic may question the true challenge of restoring a steel-and-glass box; it’s a relatively new structure, so it’s not like restoration experts are being asked to repair 19th century masonry or recreate fixtures and flourishes from past centuries.

But when “God is in the details,” re-creating and repairing requires attention to minute measurements and solving extreme sourcing challenges. After talking with restoration experts who worked on restorations of two Mies buildings, S. R. Crown Hall on the IIT campus and the Kluczynski Federal Building in Chicago’s Loop, it’s clear that protecting his work offers its own unique issues, some that may result in economic challenges to maintain perfectly faithful facades.

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Guggenheim Helsinki Inspires the New Shape of Architectural Competitions (and It’s Not a Potato)

Line//Shape//Space
Feature
March 30, 2015

At first glance, Eteläsatama, or South Harbor in Helsinki, doesn’t stand out much from the ribbons of scenic shoreline that form the Finnish capital’s border with the sea. Ferries dock nearby, crowds meander over from nearby Market Square, and anyone strolling through can pause and snap a photo of famous cathedrals or the modernist Palace Hotel.

But this 18,520-square-meter site can perhaps lay claim to a distinction no other site in the city—and the world—can. According to Troy Conrad Therrien, curator, Architecture and Digital Initiatives at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, it’s been the focus of more cumulative architectural effort than any plot of land in existence. “You could say that piece of soil on Helsinki harbor had more architectural intelligence invested in it than anything since the top of the mountain of the Parthenon,” he says.

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Can a ‘Like’ Button for Doing Good Create a More Caring Internet?

Motherboard
Feature
November 3, 2014

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Affecting articles about poverty, climate change, and epidemics come rolling down our news feeds every day. Some inspire powerful reactions, including a desire to act. But social media tends to limit how we engage with even the most devastating news—we can “Like”, ‘Share’, or ‘RT’. Needless to say, the options don’t quite channel that will into action.

Two tech-savvy Chicagoans want to make the experience of reading—and then acting—more intuitive, with what they’ve termed the Do Public Good Button. It’s a social widget that connects news stories to a marketplace of charities; it’s meant to let readers click, donate, and take action at a potential moment of inspiration. It’s part of a suite of services that Public Good Software, a public benefit corporationstarted by Obama campaign vets Dan Ratner and Jason Kunesh, plan to introduce over the next year with the goal of helping non-profits.

“We come from politics, where there’s a rising tide of disengagement because people feel their individual voice can’t make a difference,” says Ratner. “We wanted to build a system where an individual contribution can make a difference.”

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Kickstarter of the Day: Crafty Manual Coffee Maker

Dwell
Post
April 5, 2014
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It’s difficult to tell someone jonesing for coffee to slow down before their morning cup and appreciate the prep process. But after they get their hands on Chicago industrial designer and strategist Craighton Berman’s new Manual Coffeemaker No1 (MCM), they may begin to appreciate the wait.

Manual Coffee Make
Manual Coffee Maker The first entry in his new Manual houseware lines, the MCM exemplifies Berman’s approach, slowly crafting products at the intersection of design and food.

The first entry in his new Manual houseware lines, the MCM exemplifies Berman’s approach, slowly crafting products at the intersection of design and food that examine and magnify interaction points. Available on Kickstarter through April 18, the streamlined, sculptural MCM cuts a striking silhoutette on a countertop. But more important to Berman is how using it, and the routine of a counter-clockwise pour of steaming water, feels.

Manual Coffee Maker Sketches
Manual Coffee Maker sketches by Craighton Berman

“I’ve been telling people it’s at the intersection of slow food and design,” he says. “It’s about playing up the ritual more. I’m interested in a more slowed-down version of coffee.”

Berman’s coffee obsession adds a creative new concept to an already-crowded product category, steeped in classic designs from the likes of Chemex and Bialetti, and continues his streak of Kickstarter promotions; he’s also successfully launched a salt-and-pepper set and The Campaign for the Accurate Measurement of Creativity. As the Manual line expands, Berman hopes to explore an array of housewares, such as cutting boards and bar tools, that “celebrate the ritual and the process.” He’s currently refining a bottle opener made from Illinois steel and leather from Chicago’s Horween Leather Company. Like the MCM, which will patina over time as errant drips of coffee slowly color the wooden base, it’s a piece that ages well.

Manual Coffee Maker Sketches
Manual Coffee Maker sketches by Craighton Berman

Soundsystem Built to Look Like a Cubist Minaret

Dwell
Post
April 17, 2014
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Stacked like a cubist version of a custom phonograph, Resonant Surface 01 by architects and designers Christine Yogiaman and Kenneth Tracy looks like a bespoke, steampunk soundsystem. But when you talk to the creators about their installation, which debuted in a Dubai courtyard this March during the Sikka 2014 art fair, it’s clear they’re broadcasting bigger ideas of cultural remixing and reinventing.

“We’re drawn to this aesthetic,” says Tracy. “I like how the Islamic patterns comes from geometric and abstract patterns, without icons or human forms.”

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Carreau du Temple: Parisian Poetry in Glass and Steel

Dwell

Post

April 10, 2014

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When the newly restored Carreau du Temple, a marketplace and exemplar of 19th century French construction in Paris’ Marais neighborhood, officially opens to the public on April 25th, it won’t merely be an achievement in architectural preservation. By literally exposing this glass-and-steel giant to the surrounding area with a more open floor plan, the new design may create a formidable nexus for arts and culture in the French capital.

“Many structures like this were destroyed at the end of the 19th century and during the 20th century, and for me and a lot of Parisians, they’re a great memory,” says Jean-François Milou, an architect whose Studio Milou renovated the pavilion. “It’s incredibly beautiful architecture.”

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10 Things You Didn’t Know About Charles and Ray Eames

Article

Dwell

April 23, 2014

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Clowns, churches, and an aquarium: Find out how far the boundless curiosity of Ray and Charles Eames stretched.

 

“It makes me feel guilty that anybody should have such a good time doing what they are supposed to do.” It’s easy to imagine Charles Eames laughing with joy after uttering those words, a precinct summary of the way he and his wife and collaborator Ray viewed work. Their incredible accomplishments—spirited, human-centered design unbound by medium—seem like the byproduct of a state where work is play and vice versa.

And while their work in furniture, filmmaking and exhibition design is well-documented, there’s even more to their restless creativity than you might imagine. Dwell spoke with Daniel Ostroff, film producer, design historian, and editor of the forthcoming An Eames Anthology: Articles, Film Scripts, Interviews, Letters, Notes and Speeches by Charles and Ray Eames (Yale University Press), and Eames Demetrios, artist, principal of Eames Office, and grandson of the famous couple, to uncover underappreciated and relatively unknown stories about the design icons.

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Sustainable Design at Auburn’s Rural Studio

Interview

Dwell

May 28, 2014

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A bold experiment in demystifying and democratizing architecture, Auburn University’s Rural Studio, founded by Samuel Mockbee and D.K. Ruth in 1993, has overseen the construction of a menagerie of modernist structures in rural Hale County, Alabama, including the affordable 20K House. And while the work of generations of students stands as a testament to the commuity benefits of sustainable, human-centered design, the program’s influence in the field of architecture and its important role in the community suggest that its role building doesn’t end with just structures. Dwell spoke with director Andrew Freear and Elena Barthel, a professor who oversees the Rural Studio Farm, both co-authors of the new book Rural Studio at Twenty: Designing and Building in Hale County, about current and future projects, and the expanding role of farming and agriculture within the program.

Where do you see the program heading in the future, especially considering how sustainability becomes more and more relevant?

Andrew Freear: We’ve been here for 20 years. Instead of seeking survival, the program can say it’s not what we can do, it’s what we should do. I think that our community projects are always either educationally based or based on community welfare, such as the Boys & Girls clubs. Our challenge isn’t just to create those buildings and hope organizations survive, it’s how we help them survive. We built a new volunteer fire department in Newbern, and them not having to worry about their building allowed them to go gangbusters in supporting their organization. Our student’s expectations are to build, and that’s not always the answer. How do architects get involved in helping organizations sustain themselves? How do we keep going in the next 20 years supporting these organizations?

To be sustainable, you only want to build it once.

Andrew Freear: We don’t have to build for the sake of it. We tell our students, you have a privileged opportunity here. But just because it’s a design program, it doesn’t mean you’re going to build something. You have to prove that it’s needed.

Elena Barthel: The way our studio works with the community, it’s like osmosis, it’s empathetic. Twenty years is a lot of time to build up this relationship. You need to maintain your empathy with the surroundings. It’s not something you can design sitting at a table — it’s what happened when you live in the same place, experience the same weather.

Andrew Freear: The program is very proud that it’s Alabama kids doing work in the backyard of their university. Sometimes it can take an outsider to say what’s beautiful about the place. The insiders are in the weeds. The danger for us is that we’ve been here too long, and you’ve been here too long and you’ve become too familiar. The program is open year round, the office is always open. Students stay here for years and really start to put down roots. We’ve had kids stay here and get married. I have access to all of the local politicians by cell phone directly. Were we in, say, Chicago, the firewall in front of the people who make decisions is immense. And that fact that I can call them, or they can call me, that’s a big deal. They’re started to recognize us as a resource.

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The Chicago Outlaws Motorcycle Club Rides Again

Feature

Chicago Reader

April 24, 2014

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Documentary photographer Danny Lyon’s 1968 chronicle of a Chicago biker gang helped inspire Easy Rider. Now The Bikeriders revs up for a long-overdue reissue.

Danny Lyon, Route 12, Wisconsin from The<br /> Bikeriders (Aperture, 2014)

Danny Lyon, Route 12, Wisconsin from The Bikeriders (Aperture, 2014)© Danny Lyon, Courtesy Edwynn Houk Gallery

Danny Lyon doesn’t want to talk about the Chicago Outlaws Motorcycle Club. The legendary documentary photographer won’t say much about riding alongside Cal, Funny Sonny, Johnny, and the rest of the leather-clad gang in the 1960s, on an old Triumph cobbled together in a Hyde Park garage out of parts kept in coffee cans. He won’t go into great detail about the photos he took with his trusty Nikon: Benny, leaning back in the saddle, a silhouette lit up from streetlights and neon signs at Grand and Division; Big Barbara, with eyes you could get lost in, staring into a jukebox; or Andy, drinking Hamm’s longnecks off a pool table at the Stoplight bar in Cicero.

Lyon, now 72, doesn’t want the gang in which he embedded himself sensationalized the way he feels “the straight press” of his day did with headlines such as “Cycle Hoods Watched by Cops 2 Years.” Ever an iconoclast when it comes to the media, Lyon once wrote that his goal was to “create photographs that would be stronger, more truthful, and more powerful than LIFE magazine,” so that “LIFE magazine would be destroyed.” A 1966 Chicago Tribune article set the scene at the Cork—an Outlaws clubhouse in suburban Lyons that the cops sought to close—in strangely detached, almost anthropological terms: “As Cousin Joe told a brief history of the Cork, a tall, Beatle-haired waitress wearing a large ‘I Like Sex’ button served drinks to some of the pierced-eared outlaws who were ‘cooling their pipes.’ That means resting their ‘wheels’ or ‘getting a drink.'”

Lyon doesn’t feel the need to say much in part because he already said enough in The Bikeriders, a raw, compelling touchstone of New Journalism and Chicago counterculture history that documents four years spent with the Chicago Outlaws at races, runs, club meetings, loose social gatherings, and even a funeral. First published in 1968 and set for a long-overdue reissue by Aperture Press in June, the book reportedly served as inspiration for Easy Rider, with Lyon’s black-and-white photos and candid interviews painting an unvarnished portrait of the fast, furious, and sometimes fatal biker lifestyle. In a shot of a member’s scrapbook that shows a clip from a newspaper ad plugging the CBS 2 premiere of Marlon Brando in The Wild One, Lyon slyly points out the difference between the idealized vision of biker culture and the reality he believed he was capturing.

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Design in Detroit: A New Frontier?

Interview/Feature

Design Bureau

March 7, 2014

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Many things conspired to bring 23-year-old designer Lyse Cook to live and work in Detroit last June. She cops to having drunk the Kool-Aid she’s heard the stories about “the Brooklyn of her generation,” the chance to make her mark in the Wild West atmosphere of a rebuilding metropolis. Someone in love with architecture, and the life and death of the American city, couldn’t pick a better place.

“I’m excited to see what’s happening in the next five years,” she says, “and I’m excited to be around for it. Think of a pot boiling: Detroit is really hot, but it hasn’t boiled yet.”

Cook has found a welcoming environment—“people are so much warmer here than they are in Portland,” her hometown— and a promising job situation. The BYU graduate was accepted into Challenge Detroit, an urban-development and leadership program. She currently works four days a week as a graphic designer and marketing coordinator for Sachse Construction downtown, then spends the rest of her time working for many of the city’s myriad nonprofits (she recently finished a project about bike parking). Excitement and potential come up dozens of times in our conversation—“I already feel like part of the change”—and her experience isn’t unique. Developments are conspiring to make Motown appealing to Cook’s peers, even as the reality of Detroit’s financial situation persists.

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