aesthetics of joy

I spend a lot of time looking for joyful things to write about — but sometimes they just manage to fall into my lap. I arrived back from Japan to a note from Emmanuelle Moureaux, a Tokyo-based French architect who works with colors in stunning ways. (I’m particularly enamored of this design above, for the Sugamo Shinkin Bank in Shimura, which she describes on her site as a “rainbow mille-feuille.” Isn’t it just exactly that?) It kills me that I missed seeing her work in person there, but I thought she’d make a great “Joymaker” profile, and she kindly agreed to answer a few of my questions. As you’d expect from looking at her work, she has a deeply thoughtful, intentional approach to working with color. Here’s what she had to say.

How do you want people to feel when they encounter your work?
“Color” is the concept of all my works. With colors, I design new concepts, new atmospheres which will give emotions to people. I use colors in order to give emotions.

What is the role of color in your work?
I use colors as three-dimensional elements, like layers, in order to create spaces, not as a finishing touch applied to surfaces.

When I first visited Tokyo, I was shocked by the city brimming with colors. Bright colors overlapping and intermingling with each other, buildings with different volumes and layers of electric cables forming the cutout sky. To my eyes that grew up in a town made of stone, they appeared beautifully like a painting. I want with my design people feel emotion as I felt when I saw the beautiful colors of Tokyo.

I also feel in the city of Tokyo a sense of layers (buildings with different volumes, electric cables, signboards… overlapping like layers in the space). This layered structure of Tokyo gives me the feeling of depth.

These two elements (colors and layers), inspired by Tokyo, are the basis of my design. “Colors” and “layers” are expressed in a concept I develop in all my projects, the concept of “shikiri”, a made-up word literally meaning “dividing (creating) space using colors” in English. The colors, detached from two-dimensional walls or other surfaces, seem floating in the space and structure it. For example, in the Sugamo Shinkin Bank / Niiza Branch, “squares of colors ” floating in the space structure it, giving it its form and depth. For the Tokiwadai Branch, “leaves of colors” play the same role.

Ed. note: I absolutely love that so many of these projects are banks, places we think of as dry and corporate. (And pretty much the last place you’d expect to find a rainbow!)

“Shikiri” is a colorful partition series, inspired by the Japanese traditional sliding screens. Sliding paper or wood partitions used in the past in all the Japanese houses have almost disappeared now. I feel sad to see these very functional and beautiful Japanese traditional sliding screens fading away now days, so I continue to bring out the essence of the old, and turn them into something modern and practical, which still can be used today. I am trying to reintroduce them in a different way with the concept of “Shikiri”.

If you were a color, what color would you be?
Multicolor : I never use one color but always combine several colors.

What are some objects that symbolize joy to you?
Color palettes (Pantone etc…), color samples (color acrylic, color textile…)…  Everything which has a lot of colors in the palette makes me happy.

What is one project hiding in your sketchbook that you’d love to build one day?
“Shikiri house”: its concept is defined so I would like to build it. Also, there are very strong relations between the products I design (better to call them “mini architectures) and architecture. Stick chair, shibafu table are designed as buildings. Puzzle box too. Toge would be the structure for a building…. So I would like to realize them in a big scale.

I could only post a small fraction of Moureaux’s joyful work here — there are so many more vibrant works on her site. See more here. Incidentally, her thoughts on Tokyo color mirror my reactions to the place, which I posted last week. See here, if you missed it.

Images: courtesy Emmanuelle Moureaux

For a reserved culture, the Japanese certainly aren’t shy about color. Everywhere in Tokyo you find pops of the brightest hues, on doors and signage, traffic cones and taxicabs. The color comes in broad swathes and little bursts. Sometimes it’s functional color, telling you where to go or what to pay attention to. A big, bold color system like the one above makes an incredibly complex train system effortlessly navigable by non-Japanese speakers. At other times it’s purely joyful, a gratuitous flick of the paintbrush, a little dance of neon whose only purpose is to make you feel good.

Where along the way to becoming a civilized society did we lose color? This is the question I’ve been asking myself since the trip, as I’ve tried to understand the differences in how Americans and Japanese use color in our environment. Seriously, in the West our relationship to color is utterly dysfunctional. In office cubicles, condo complexes, subways, highways, sidewalks, malls — the contexts we spend most of our time in — the palette is a monochromatic blur of industrial taupes and dingy greys.

It would be wrong to say there’s no color in our urban landscapes. But look down a highway or in a city center and take notice: where do you see it? In the ads, of course. We damp down our rooms and streets so that the billboards can pop out, ensuring we can’t miss their consumerist banners. We are stingy with color where it could benefit the collective good; we are profligate with it when it’s a conduit to corporate gain.

In Japan, it is as if everyone understands the value of color, and adheres to a code to use it in a sensitive yet exuberant way.

This “book bar” at the Tsutaya Books in Daikanyama (one of the absolute don’t miss spots if you’re planning a trip to Tokyo) strikes me as a perfect example of relevant, natural color, harnessed in a delightful way.

These to-die-for lamps in the lobby of the Claska hotel are a perfect example of thoughtful color use. It’s so Japanese to put the color on the inside, where it isn’t aggressive and where the light can bring the color alive with its soft glow. More pops of color below (a few of which couldn’t help but make their way into my suitcase): the gallery at the Impossible Project, lighting from the amazing Danish flower shop Nicolai Bergman in Aoyama, a Patricia Urquiola chair in the roof garden at the Tokyu Plaza shopping center, colorful washi tapes at Tokyu Hands, colored pencils at stationery mecca Itoya, and joy stickers from Kiddyland.

The taxicabs! We spent an inordinate amount of time taking pictures of taxicabs, with their vibrant colors and playful stripes, checks, and patterns. They look like giant toy cars driving around the city. I can’t complain, living in a city that paints its taxis cheery yellow, but I do think there is something about the Japanese taxi palette that is really charming.

I saw dots everywhere in Tokyo. The joy of polka dots is probably another post entirely, but I loved seeing these various spots around the city. My absolute favorite was happening upon the red and white spotted packages of Tsumori Chisato outside the store (bottom left), ready for pickup. Can you imagine receiving one in the mail? How boring an Amazon box seems by comparison… On the bottom right is work by Koichiro Kimura, from his quirky and amazing gallery space in Aoyama.

It was also fun to stumble upon a Tokyo installation of Damien Hirst’s dots exhibit in the new Hikarie center. I had seen them at the two Chelsea Gagosian galleries earlier this year, but seeing them in Japan, they just seemed so perfectly at home. I love how even the exhibit key (bottom left) has a charming quality to it.

Images: mine and Erika Lee’s

Have you seen the madness that is the installation created for the Dior 2012 AW haute couture show? These photos leave me a bit breathless. Giddy, like I could forget the clothes entirely, see a show of forty models in paper bags, and rave that it was the best thing I’d ever seen in fashion. Flowers can make even the sanest person lose their mind.

This joyful superabundance is the work of Raf Simons (and dozens of floral stylists — view the “Making of…” here), who debuted as Dior’s new creative director with this show. Clearly, he felt he needed to make an impact. The inspiration is Christian Dior’s own idea of the “flower women,” referring to his famous, very feminine silhouettes of the 40s. Beyond that, I don’t think we can get too analytical about it. The show notes are mostly gobbledygook. (A sample:  ”This is one of the ways Christian Dior’s ‘Flower Women’… become contemporary in the collection; the architecture of flowers is analysed in a different way for the contemporary world.”)

Anyway, the experience speaks for itself. This isn’t about the architecture of flowers, it’s about the pleasure of flowers. It’s about a fantasy made real. It is pure, immersive, sensory joy. There’s really only one thing to do with it, and that’s to enjoy it. Happy daydreaming!

Via: The House That Lars Built

And if you want more flowers, check out the technicolor landscapes of the Netherlands as the tulips are blooming.

The painter of Ireland works with a green brush – this is nothing new. But I was unprepared for the extravagance of it all. On arriving in the Southeast, near Cork, my jet-lagged eyes had to recalibrate to process all the shades of green, all the textures. It is a kind of vegetal madness here, a raucous glut of sun-soaked growth. It is a cliché illustrated in hyperbole.

No surface is uncovered by moss or grass or lichen, no branch left unbowed by a corolla of leaves. The plant kingdom sorts itself messily into layers. Ferns spring out of tufts of olive-hued moss, on tree trunks filmed with algae. Grasses race skyward, indecorously. Duckweed forgets its place; it traces a lacy path up drains onto driveways, a cheery, swampy carpet. Frills of perennials pour out of crevices in walls. Spring got the memo here: It. Is. On.

I walk until I hit a fence, trace it until I find a gate and walk on. My footsteps compress the grass, scenting the air with chlorophyll. A rabbit skitters nervously across the field. Flora own this place; the fauna are just tenants here. And we modern, house-dwelling humans are only visitors – guests if we behave ourselves, interlopers if we misstep.

With fresh memories of winter, it is a joy to be in this landscape of renewal, immersed in such giddy reanimation. Liberated from ice and hard ground, the yellow-green fronds thrum with audible energy. Something in our souls is listening. This verdant quickening is our reveille, a call to slough off winter’s slowness and participate in regeneration. In temperate climates, it’s a profound inflection point in our relationship with our surroundings, marking the moment where the landscape begins to feel alive to us, and to be a source of energy.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this after listening to a wonderful interview with the late Irish poet and philosopher John O’Donohue (on a recommendation from my dear friend Mara). O’Donohue brims with wisdom about the relevance of beauty to meaning in life, and speaking of landscapes, he observes:

I think it makes a huge difference when you wake in the morning and come out of your house whether you believe your are walking into a dead geographical location which is used to get to a destination or whether you are emerging into a landscape that is just as much if not more alive as you but in a totally different form. And if you go towards it with an open heart and a real watchful reverence, that you will be absolutely amazed at what it will reveal to you.

(Before I go on, I must urge you to listen to the interview because reading the quote cannot give you the feeling you get from hearing O’Donohue’s placid, lyrical voice. I hope you will.)

Now, coming back to the topic at hand, the frenzy of unfurling and blossoming, the green, the growth – these aesthetics of renewal, the reminders of the simmering life in our surroundings. Why should we care about these artifacts of the landscape? Why, as O’Donohue says, should we be bothered with what they might reveal to us? Or rather, in an age where foraging is a hobby rather than a subsistence strategy, why should these inedible, unsellable displays matter to us at all?

Our emotions are often vestigial imprints of our ancestors’ rhythms, and without conscious explanation our neurotransmitters soak our brains with pleasure chemicals in these same cycles. No matter how detached from the earth we are in our workaday existence, our bodies vibrate to its frequencies. The return of greenness feels like a return to life. It’s why we hold festivals to celebrate cherry blossoms. It’s why we freak out about ramps. Spring is our stirring. It rises into us from the ground up.

(Also, a lush environment signals other things that might be beneficial. Clean air. Unpolluted rainwater. Sunshine. Good property values. This practical lens can’t be underestimated.)

Of course, the greenness is just the surface. That lush field is all cell division, pollen, and spores – plants grasping for one another like freshman at a frat party. All this wild greening is nature’s adolescence, and those allergies are testament to a large-scale seduction. These aesthetics of vibrance are also aesthetics of sex. And plant sex brings about all kinds of things we like, such as those that might be baked in a pie, or those that taste best with a sprinkling of sea salt and some Tuscan olive oil.

It’s strange to say from this vantage that I had no particular interest in Ireland before I ended up here. Soul-starved by a winter that dragged despite its mildness, I had a craving for verdure. But despite the platitudes of an emerald isle, sold to us Americans by cereal box leprechauns and intensely scented soap, I hadn’t thought about the greenness in the planning. It was almost an accident that I ended up here: a workshop that never happened, a scrambled plan, an affordable airfare. And suddenly I was here, submerged in it, and grateful.

Landscapes can wake us up, recall us to ourselves, stir us out of apathy, heal pains. They absorb tremendous anxiety and radiate energy. We are just starting to understand the emotional impacts of nature, but they seem to parallel the physical effects of plants, which complement our physiology, breathing in our effluent carbon dioxide, and exhaling oxygen. In seeing some rare, wild landscapes this week, I’m reminded of the destruction we are bringing to so many of these sacred places. I hope through a deeper understanding of what they give us, we might feel inspired to take better care of them.

The enemy of joy is coolness.

So says Jim Cooper in an excellent post on his blog, Jim and His Camera. The post talks about witnessing the dancing and revelry of Shanghainese people of all ages in Fuxing Park, and ponders why in the West we don’t embrace such joyful behavior. The conclusion Jim comes to is that rather than embracing our impulses toward joy, we worship cool, a tendency that acts like a “joy police” to tamp down uninhibited displays and enforces this restraint with humiliation and ridicule. Jim writes:

Our lowest level of hell is embarrassment from being deemed uncool. When did we begin to worship this false god: the God of Cool?  The God of Cool forbids spontaneity, silliness and innocence. He encourages snickering not belly laughter, he allows crotch grinding, and ass-shaking but not the smooth arm extended glide of romance – romance is patronized, smiles must be condescending and arrogance is encouraged.

What an evil god the God of Cool is.

I think Jim is right on here. The extent to which joy and coolness are opposed is striking, even if not really surprising. Joy is inclusive and embracing; coolness is detached and superior. Joy is energetic and abundant; coolness is muted and scarce. Joy is warm, and coolness is well, chilly. Coolness is a rigid code of self-control that thrives in a climate of judgment, while joy is at its purest before we learn to judge. At its root, coolness is a status-conscious system, while joy is non-hierarchical, oblivious to rank and prestige.

We’re certainly not without our joys here in the West, but this particular kind of quotidian freedom to move and play is something we accord to children, not ourselves. We think too much of the potential judgments of others, and not enough of the pleasure and companionship we might find in the behavior itself. We’ve made it taboo and risky to be silly, playful, and vulnerable. Why do we only dance in the streets at festivals and parades, at places and times where such activity is sanctioned and corralled?

There’s an evident tension between the freedoms enjoyed by Westerners and our abstention from many public joys, and the repressive constraints endured by most Chinese, and the way they give themselves to this kind of pleasure. Jim observes:

People in Fuxing Park have had lives harder than we in the West can ever imagine. They’ve survived revolution and cultural change beyond our comprehension. They twirl, jiggle, sing, fling and sometimes waltz with strangers – eyes closed, living in a perfect self-created moment. There’s a beautiful heartbreaking dignity to it: a dignity found in heroic uninhibited innocence.

Where do we find permission to recapture that joy? Because it is a kind of dignity, a much greater dignity than coolness’s hauteur, a dignity born of authenticity rather than condescension. It makes me wonder how design might better support the collective liberation of our playful tendencies. Where are the oases where we let the mask drop, where we risk awkwardness for joy? One place that occurs to me is amusement parks – but are there less extreme environments that break down our need to be seen a certain way, and allow us simply to enjoy ourselves together?

Images: Jim Cooper
Via: Paul Bennett 

Are any of you feeling like this year took off at a gallop and hasn’t quite given you time to find your seat in the saddle? You can blame my recent quietude on that and Downton Abbey. (I quit cable only to be seduced by Dame Maggie Smith and WWI drama on pbs.org. But I digress.)

For the past couple of weeks I’ve been thinking a lot about birdsong. It started with this TEDtalk, in which Julian Treasure talks about the psychological benefits of birdsong. You know birdsong feels uplifting intuitively, but do you know why? The explanation is so sensible you’ll smack your forehead when I tell you. It’s because birds chirp when things are safe, and go quiet when there’s danger. So for thousands of years birdsong has been a subtle background signal that tells us, unconsciously, that we’re safe. Just because we don’t typically rely on that cue any more doesn’t mean our brains aren’t still wired for it. Though it’s an anachronism for many city dwellers, it’s still relaxing. And if the birds’ tones are particularly pleasant, they might even spur a sense of joy.

This is just one example of biophilia, a theory developed by E.O. Wilson postulating that humans have a natural, evolved affinity for the natural world. According to the theory, all kinds of natural stimuli can have a positive effect on wellbeing. (More here.) There’s a spike in research on this topic, and birdsong is among the aesthetic elements being researched. In the UK, the Guardian reported on a new study that will study effects of birdsong on people over the next three years. Eleanor Ratcliffe, the researcher conducting the study believes birdsong could also have effects on productivity and creativity.

Another question up for exploration: Does birdsong have the same effect when recorded? Sample of one reporting here, but I think it could. Earlier this week I downloaded the free Birdsong app for iPhone and have been listening in the mornings while getting ready for work, and it definitely perked me up. (Soundtrack to this post provided by the birds in my Brooklyn backyard recorded last spring. Bonus for birdwatching readers who want to tell me what species are hanging out back there.)

Delving deeper, research has shown that birdsong contains fractal patterns, suggesting some underlying symmetry in the sounds themselves that is pleasing to us. Fractals are intricate patterns that repeat themselves infinitely at different scales. Fractals can be found in coastlines, clouds, snowflakes, and blood vessels, as well as many works of art. (Jackson Pollock’s paintings have been analyzed and discovered to have fractal dimensions.) The authors of a paper on fractals and beauty, Alex Forsythe and Noel Sheehy, write:

It is thought that fractals tap into specialist cognitive modules that have developed to modulate information about living things, and that such modules are linked with emotional regulation… Hagerhall et al. reported that viewing fractal patterns elicited high alpha activity in the areas of the brain concerned with attention and visual spatial processing (the frontal lobes and parietal area).

Allow me to translate: Research suggests that our brains respond unconsciously to fractals, regarding them as information that gives us critical insight about our surroundings, and tell us how to feel them. We don’t need conscious knowledge that fractals are involved. Regardless of our awareness, we sense an intuitive order that gives us comfort. In fact, the authors note that studies have shown fractal patterns can reduce physiological stress. Another primal, comforting sound – the human heartbeat – also has a fractal dimension, and the more fractal it is, the healthier it is likely to be. So, perhaps birdsong actually has a kind of symmetrical microstructure that speaks to us through these hidden neural pathways. And perhaps tapping into its tones and rhythms could help create soundscapes that can counteract some of the stress of hectic, noisy modern lives.

As our favorite Portlandia crafters know, looking at images of birds doesn’t hurt either, and I love this series by photographer Paul Nelson, featured in an exhibit called Sky and Sea put on by Lux Archive at The Natural Wine Company in Brooklyn. It’s wonderful to see the birds set apart from the world, aloft. (Even better to know none were harmed in the shooting – Nelson uses a specialized rig to capture the ethereal images.) The exhibit runs until May 9.

*Correction: The original version of this post misidentified the site of the exhibit. The exhibit is at The Natural Wine Company, not the Lux Gallery (if such a place even exists!)

I’m spending quite a bit of time lately contemplating the emotional lives of cities. Between my talk at makeCalgary on designing joyful cities and a related installment in the works for my Core77 column, the topic of how our urban environments make us feel is top of mind at the moment. But it’s rare to see the city reflect our own emotion back at us. This project, Emotional Cities, is a novel exception, using light installations to project the collective emotional state of the city. City dwellers can input their mood on a web site via a simple color-coded schema. The original installation was in Stockholm (above) and a subsequent version was temporarily installed on the Palace Albania in Belgrade.

The project blog is unfortunately a bit dated, so it’s unclear whether it’s still going, but it’s a beautiful experiment nonetheless. I wonder what the effects are of knowing what everyone else in your city is feeling. If it’s a purple day (the lowest of the doldrums, on the Emotional Cities scale), do you feel dragged down? If it’s a red day (the happiest), do you feel a boost?

I can imagine we’ll see more of these types of projects in the near future, as the technology to create light installations is becoming more accessible and platforms like Twitter and Facebook are offering a robust and constantly updated data set on emotion and mood. It would be fun to see more buildings that become, as Emotional Cities says, like thermometers for the feelings of a city.

Tonight I had the privilege of speaking at makeCalgary, a conference that looks to design for inspiration on instigating catalytic change in cities. The theme is “provoking Calgary’s next chapter,” and to that end I’ll be sharing some design principles for joyful cities, using examples from New York (which has been experiencing its own waves of inspiring change lately). I was incredibly impressed with the level of dialogue and especially the sensitivity to emotion among the crowd. Calgary is clearly primed for joyful change.

One fascinating discussion emerged around the idea of winter. A commenter observed that very few images in the presentations showed winter, of which Calgary has a hefty one. How do we create joy when the landscape forces us indoors, or at least makes it less natural to want to be outside? A fellow speaker, Rob Adams, head of urban design for the city of Melbourne offered a nice piece of advice from the Danes: “There is no bad weather. Only bad clothing.” I love this because it underscores that joy so often lives outside of the comfort zone. In North America we overwhelmingly design for comfort. But comfort is often inimical to joy because it is so cozy we become complacent and insular, rather than openminded, exploratory, and social. Better to take the advice of a commenter from Winnipeg who noted that residents of that city often skate to work on their river once it has frozen over!

Tomorrow, I’ll be helping to lead a charrette to apply some of the diverse inspirations from different cities to a site within Calgary. Looking forward to sharing back after the conference.

If you’re curious to hear more about what I’ll be sharing, here’s a link to a podcast interview I did with two of the conference’s organizers, Matt Knapik and Kate van Fraassen. Fun!

A few months ago I wrote about the Hypothetical Development Project, a collaboration between Rob Walker, Ellen Susan, and G. K. Darby to create “imagined futures” of abandoned buildings, expressed through mock architectural renderings. Over on Places, Rob Walker now has a great piece relating the story of the project, as well as its role in the context of architectural fiction. (The piece also quotes some thoughts from the original Aesthetics of Joy writeup.)

On the surface, design fiction is an odd concept. Design is a functional discipline, a craft driven to make ideas tangible, to concretize solutions into usable forms. Design operates on the principle that by distilling imagination into form, it becomes truth. People can dislike a thing, dispute its purpose, disagree with its intentions – but they cannot deny it exists.

On the other hand, fiction is a lie. A welcome and seductive lie, perhaps, but still a non-truth. And the subject of a lie does not exist beyond the world of its own narrative. So within “design fiction” there is a tension – between tangible and ephemeral, existence and non-existence, imagination and reality. Walker rightly points out that many of the architectural renderings we see are just this kind of designed fabrication. (Many are created as marketing gestures, but the projects they show are never funded and therefore never built.) In this sense, they are less lies, and more, as I noted in my original assessment, manifestations of hope and desire. Unable to predict THE future, they instead try to depict A future, a kind of illuminating untruth. What is illuminated? As Walker points out, both something in the abandoned structure, the forlorn substrate of the fiction, and in the viewer themselves.

The moment that interests me most, I suppose, would be the random passerby who suddenly notices that building he or she has walked past a hundred times, just because there’s this sign on it, this arrestingly uncanny sign that tells a story that’s blatantly and intentionally absurd. I think that moment — the story, in one image, of an implausible future for an unpopular place — makes the building exist again in a new way. It changes nothing into something.

I think it makes the passerby exist in a new way, too.

The role of designer as storyteller is not a new construct in the design world, but I think this project gives it new resonance, or at least reminds us that the value of conceptual design (even absurdist conceptual design with no hope of being made real) need not be subordinate to the design of the functional here-and-now. Design fiction gives us places to go. It highlights features and flaws. It expresses wishes in a voice much nicer than a whine. In some ways, it is a necessary precursor to “real” design, if we want that design to represent progress, and not just continuation.

I say all of this as a former fiction writer, one with great respect for the simple joy of a story told for its own sake. While as a designer I am tempted to look for a practical application for Hypothetical Development, as a writer I’m happy for it just to just contribute to the general joy of our surroundings. As Walker writes, “…I don’t think a story needs to be considered a means to an end. A story is an end. And a sign on an abandoned building is as good a medium as I can think of for telling an entertaining tale.” The beauty of design fiction is the way it fuses the storyteller’s art with the evocative palette of the form-crafter. It’s a rich space, and if I take anything away from the project, it’s that many, many entertaining (and inspiring) tales are waiting to be told.

Places: Implausible Futures for Unpopular Places

For about thirty seconds after coming across this piece, “Housing Boom, if You’re a Bird,” in the NYT, I was enchanted. I read: