aesthetics of joy

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!

They look almost like brightly colored mosses, don’t they? Like some new form of street lichen. Or a kind of chromatic filling compound. A rainbow grout.

This set of sculptures by artist Juliana Santacruz Herrera is a particularly striking example of yarnbombing, a form of knit or crochet-based street art that frequently reacts to the urban environment. In Herrera’s case, this means applying braided fabric in looped forms to cracks in the sidewalks of Paris. Like the pothole gardens and lego repairs I’ve written about in past posts, Herrera’s works use delight to call attention to the breakdown of infrastructure in the city. Like other yarnbombing projects, they work with maximal contrast – in color, contour, density, and texture – to catch our eyes and make us take notice. While they don’t actually fix the problems they’re addressing, it’s possible that inducing this kind of positive affect makes people more inclined to act to change their environments. More than an angry letter or a protest, these works create a desire to share with others, creating a kind of social momentum.

Herrera’s works are one more example of a phenomenon I call joyful repair – the act of mending or calling attention to a damaged element of the environment using color, texture, playful gestures, and other aesthetics of joy. It’s a form of joyful activism, which tries to bring about change through positive emotion, and it’s one of my very favorite applications of aesthetics of joy.

Here’s another example I’ve had in my files for awhile. Working at a slightly smaller scale, London artist Ben Wilson uses chewing gum splotches as a canvas for tiny, brightly colored sidewalk art. Wilson has been creating the paintings since 1998, and estimates he’s made over 10,000 of the little works! Interestingly, not long after he began his gum-painting endeavors, people began making requests for particular designs, often commemorative. So what began as litter has become an odd little system of tribute, like plaques on park benches or in front of newly planted trees. People want to be associated with something they feel good about, and with a little color and charm, that even could be improperly discarded chewing gum. The sidewalk at first seems an unusually mundane place for this sort of personal connection, but maybe not. After all, the sidewalk is the most intimate of transitory spaces in a community, the backdrop for so many of our daily dramas and spontaneous joys. Filling its holes, reclaiming its blemishes – in some way these are a deeply integral form of reconstruction.

There’s something else here, too. Projects like this are a signal that someone cares about a place, that the condition of that environment matters to someone. Someone is paying attention to the details. To make something beautiful is to invest time and energy in it, and these two are the most valuable, limited resources we have. We perceive this signal of caring and passion, often unconsciously, and we typically follow in kind. We read our landscape for cues about how to treat it, we draw inferences about the inhabitants, and we subtly alter our behavior to maintain this condition – or enhance it. These aesthetic signals often become a discourse of community, a conversation between the denizens of a place that leads, via a subtle form of one-upmanship, to the organic growth and improvement of our favorite places to call home. Alain de Botton has written (I’m paraphrasing here) that one of architecture’s purposes is to inspire us to be better people, and I would say the same for any of these urban interventions. We see improvements, and they unconsciously motivate us to improve ourselves.

Joyful repair projects can serve as jumpstarts for this process. This project, though not new, is a great example of this principle applied over a large scale. Called “Favela Painting,” this brightly colored village is the work of Dutch artists Jeroen Koolhaas and Dre Urhahn. Working in a slum outside Rio, their goal is to use art “as a tool to inspire, create beauty, combat prejudice, and attract attention.” The care and passion embodied by the murals effectively transforms the favela from outside in. Some really thoughtful words about the effects of this project, on the Magical Urbanism site:

‘Favela painting’ affects the aesthetic order of how favelas are perceived from within and outside its natural embryonic growth. Colour brings hope. It brings a different understanding of space and its people, inviting others to co-create and co-represent much more constructively and positively life here. It appeals to our senses in a way that we do not reject but embrace these places and the potential for better life. It articulates a different discourse of social change; of engagement, contributing to improve life for favela dwellers.

It’s hard to say it any more succinctly than “color brings hope.” It suggests energy, and as such it has an uplifting and an attractive power. It’s a harbinger of better things to come. As I think about the phenomenon of joyful repair, I’m reminded of the root of the word repair, the Latin parare, “to make ready.” By repairing things, we are making them ready again. By repairing them joyfully, we’re making them ready for wonderful things to happen in the future.

Images: Juliana Santacruz Herrera on Flickr via designboom; Ben Wilson via Inhabitat; Favela Painting via The Fox Is Black.

{Thank you Maggie and BD}

A wonderful find, from my dear friend Mara of Neither Snow, is this “rainbow warrior.” The warrior is a street artist working in Albuquerque, using spilled paint to pour rainbows off the tops of buildings. He (or she)’s really got some people riled up (see newscast, here) and it strikes me as remarkable that people can be so dour in the face of rainbows.

The charm of the story is in how the community has rallied to the warrior’s defense. This Facebook page has drawn 1,492 fans “in support of the Rainbow Warrior, whomever s/he may be.” And the soul of the story is in the warrior’s own words. This is the warrior on his/her inspiration for painting the rainbows:

About three or four years ago … I was feeling really depressed and I had this notion that if I went out and painted a rainbow, maybe someone would see it and feel what I was feeling or feel anything as intensely as I was. The first one I did, I just literally dumped the paint over the side of a pretty ugly, abandoned, alleyway building.

And this is the warrior on street art:

I want to inspire other people. That’s part of all my art; it’s always positive. I think I chose street art to inspire somebody else in a way that’s outside of the box. Like somebody who wouldn’t normally be exposed to street art, somebody who would just walk past it. Street art really saves a lot of people who are down in their lives and on their luck. This is their one and only outlet. Plus, you get an immediate response from people. A lot of times it’s just, Look at that graffiti on that freeway wall. But maybe the graffiti on the freeway isn’t the ugly thing, maybe that’s not what they’re angry about. Maybe they’re angry about how for the last 10 years you’ve been driving through this prison freeway with these big ugly gray walls and it just took the graffiti to point out the ugly that was already there.

I find this tension – between the forbidden act of graffiti, technically vandalism, and the delight people are discovering as a consequence – acutely compelling. Is an illegal rainbow still joyful? Here’s a letter writer commenting on the rainbow warrior situation:

So, somebody lays down a rainbow on the thing, a piece of art (and yes, it is art, even if it is “free,” and maybe especially so) that pokes fun at the mess, that makes me grin and say, “That’s a little better!” As a life-long citizen of Albuquerque, as someone who has had his very personal property damaged by genuinely malicious individuals: this isn’t the same thing. Is it graffiti? Yeah. Is it the same as somebody tagging a vulgar word on the car my parents gave me when I went to college? No. The intention of the rainbows is perhaps mischievous, but it is definitely not malicious. The intention, and the execution, is a wink, a laugh, a little unexpected burst. Worth a slap on the wrist and a good talking to, nothing more.

(Ok, and now I’m going to pause, because the 400 words and 45 minutes I just spent finishing this post have vanished into the ether that is this charming second day of the new year. [Deep breath and a moment to convince myself it will come out better the second time around.] Ok…)

I like this distinction between mischief and malice. The mess the writer refers to is the Anasazi building, the most public of the warrior’s targets, a high-rise which had recently been taken over by the Albuquerque government because the developer was charged with fraud, (a crime with no discernible aesthetic value). I like the idea that the rainbow has in a way recast an unfortunate incident for the citizens of the city. Redemption, via transgression.

How important is this element of transgression in the joy we feel from street art? Is there something inherent in the violation of boundaries that fuels our pleasure when we look at it? The carefree disregard of the strictures of private ownership and the numbing conventions of urban aesthetic culture? Maybe our delight is less about the vibrancy of the color, and more about the irrepressible spirit that put it there.

I’ve been wondering this in the wake of a visit last week to Wynwood Walls, a collection of murals in an artfully dingy Miami neighborhood. Wynwood brings together works by a range of street artists, well-known names like Futura, Shepherd Fairey, Nunca, Space Invader, etc. under the sanction of gallerists and developers, in a project that dropped out of Art Basel 2009. I really like a number of these works (particularly the piece by Nunca, below), and I recognize that the mainstreaming of street art gives these artists a chance to make a real living, but I can’t help but wonder: Is some of the joy lost by bringing these works into this kind of walled garden? Tamed by the light of legality and legitimacy, are they just a bit less vibrant, a bit more inert?

Maybe my previous question – Can an illegal rainbow be joyful? – had it backwards. Maybe it’s precisely the illegality that touches us. Mischief, with its attendant unpredictability and freedom, makes us feel vicariously free.

Thoughts?

By the way, if you find yourself in Miami, definitely make your way over to Wynwood and see it for yourself. Have lunch at the Wynwood Kitchen and Bar and wander the zillions of galleries which seem to have sprung up, perfectly distressed-looking, practically yesterday. It’s a nice day out, and a welcome departure from the excess of the design district.

Rainbow Warrior images via Patricia Austhoff and The Fibe Squad. And again, thanks, Mara.

Recovering from a holiday of excess, I want to be in austerity mode, but I can’t help being drawn to the almost comical sense of abundance in these images from photographer Alain Delorme’s Totems series. If you’ve spent any time in the developing world, you’ve seen that these laden bicyclists are the normal mode of transportation for all kinds of goods, and it’s a source of great delight to see how cleverly the operators pile their wares onto such delicate craft. I know this is hard work, and I don’t mean to romanticize their labor, but having seen many of these kinds of carriers in person, I’ve been consistently surprised by their apparent lack of struggle. Despite the top-heavy proportions of their loads, their  balance seems remarkably effortless, and I find that looking at them evokes a sort of reverence for this almost magical skill.

On the DesignBoom blog, Andrea Chin writes:

The verticality of these formations echoes the incessant expansion of the urban area, constantly under construction. Here, De lorme gives a new vision full of humor and poetry of those porters – both super heroes and ants with impressive loads of tires, water containers, office chairs, flowers… Distanced from the typical photos of China portraying immense crowds, he has focused on the individuality of these workers, as opposed to all those identical and interchangeable objects.

While I can see the urban expansion metaphor and the emblematic reflection of the spread of materialism, it’s not the first place I go when I look at these images. For me, the reaction is much more emotional, and focuses more on the latter statement about the individuality and humanity of the workers. Unlike the numberless trucks that ferry goods around western cities, their facades obscuring their contents, each of these improvised structures is a unique composition, a transient artifact of human ingenuity. They’re less elegant than purpose-built cargo transports, but they have a kind of ramshackle beauty. Accidental sculptures, they remind me of the limitless nature of human assiduity, and the joy that lies in so many ordinary acts.

Alain Delorme: Totems
via: Erin Loechner’s lovely Design for Mankind

Can something say “Keep Out!” and still be joyful?

This was the question that popped into my head as I considered the Razzle Dazzle Sculptural Security object, the angular plywood contraption jammed in the window of the house pictured above, by Detroit-based Design 99. The purpose of the Razzle Dazzle (more examples of which you can see below) is to protect empty houses from squatting and vandalization, a common problem in Detroit neighborhoods. An alternative to boarding up doors and windows, the method signifies that someone is interested in looking after a place.

A strong thread of joyful activism runs through all of Design 99′s projects: the brightly-painted Power House, a community space cum sculpture made from a previously empty house, or the Neighborhood Machine, a similarly hued Bobcat with trailers that can be appended for various urban renewal tasks, such as gardening and collecting found material. For these projects, aesthetics of joy such as bright color, stripes, and other patterns catch the eye and raise awareness for urban renewal projects. They also telegraph the spirit of the movement, and offer an exuberant energy that might inspire volunteers and invite onlookers to join in. The aesthetics visually convey the intent of the artists behind Design 99, Gina Reichert and Mitch Cope:

The Power House intends to be a stimulator and not an end in itself as a singular art object. The Power House is a broadcaster of potential ideas and a place to plug those ideas into. The Power House will be used as an interactive site, by us and by our neighbors. The Power House will become a symbol for creativity, new beginnings and social interaction within the neighborhood.

But while the house and the machine seek to invite, the purpose of the Razzle Dazzle is entirely different. It’s a three-dimensional “No Trespassing” sign. So there’s an inherent tension between the spiky, angular form, which articulates (and enforces) the “stay away” message, and the vibrant pattern, which is a visceral enticement. There is also a tension in the way the piece is crafted. The Razzle Dazzle’s form is haphazard, seemingly cobbled together from debris — something you might expect to see at an abandoned site. It looks like it might itself be an act of vandalism. But the deliberate color treatment transforms the meaning of the piece. It says, “Someone put me here on purpose,” and therefore, “Someone cares about this place.”

In this way, the Razzle Dazzle is inviting. Through a splash of color, it offers the promise that a space will be inhabited by people who will care for it and restore it. It’s an invitation to return, suggesting that next time you visit, it may not be an abandoned shack, but a lively business, a vibrant community gathering space, or a home. It’s a joyful “Keep Out,” because it’s also a “Come Back Soon.”

{via Core77}

Power House and Neighborhood Machine

Neighborhood Machine with solar panel trailer attached

Gardening trailer for Neighborhood Machine

Razzle Dazzle Sculptural Security objects

This unassuming little book caught my eye the other day. Inside is a series of simple photos highlighting a phenomenon I’ve long considered joyful: plants that have managed to break through hard urban surfaces and green up the cracks in the city environment.

It’s hard not to feel a sense of delight at the pictures of these little sprouts, and their triumph of living matter over inert concrete, vegetable over mineral, soft over hard. As one reviewer put it, these scrappy, weedy things are “the underdogs of the plant world.” They’re like pioneers pitching a colorful tent in a harsh landscape, brave things that are cheerful in the face of long odds.

I Think I Can looks to be part of a six-book series by Partners & Spade. Another title in the series is The Benefits of Looking Up, which also seems to have joyful potential.

Artist Pete Dungey says of his Pothole Gardens, “If we planted one of those in every hole, it would be like a forest in the road.” Indeed. And a gorgeous, surprising example of urban renewal and joyful activism.

{via for the love of bikes}

Spotted this installation near the corner of 33rd and Lex a few weeks ago. Despite the bitter cold, people kept stopping to play. Does anyone know whose work this is?

These joyful Christmas cones in Barcelona’s Mercat Santa Catarina square are bike powered! Passersby can hop on for a few minutes to keep the LEDs going. Now if only they could find a way to get the Rockefeller Center skaters to fire up NYC’s big tree…

See more bike-powered holiday installations on Vanessa’s joyful blog for the love of bikes.

Remember these? I found one lying (improperly) discarded on a subway platform back in September and labeled it “joyful litter.” Now, the NYT explains: it’s a public art project by artist Reed Seifer.

Read more, here.

{via @swissmiss}

I love non-traditional street art. Yarnbombing, seedbombing, mossbombing, LED throwies — anything that brightens and transforms the urban environment really brings me a sense of joy.

So this scent graffiti by Mitchell Heinrich really charms me. Scent is a particularly interesting medium for several reasons. Heinrich says:

Scent is interpreted by the limbic system which is very closely tied to emotion and memory. This leads me to believe that interacting with people using scent can potentially be a much more powerful medium than paint since people experiencing it can’t help but react to it. The goal of this project is to realize the potential of smell as art and to explore different ways of using it to interact with people.

True, but this is only part of the story. Scent requires proximity in a way that vision does not. Visual understanding is nearly immediate once something enters our eyeline. But scent is based on the diffusion of volatile chemicals through the environment, so it reaches us in a more gradual way. It’s like vision is a sudden downpour and scent is a slowly increasing drizzle. So the quality of the surprise achieved is fundamentally different.

Also, in a chat I had a few weeks ago with Dr. Pamela Dalton at the Monell Chemical Senses Center, I learned one of the most important factors in scent processing is context. Many scents occur in multiple contexts. One example is butyric acid, a molecule that in some situations we recognize as aged cheese, and in others we recoil from as the odor of sweaty feet. Without realizing it, we constantly use contextual information to interpret scents and determine how to react emotionally to them. This fact creates some interesting possibilities for scent art. By taking scents strongly identified with a particular context — say cut grass or baking cookies — and pairing them with urban contexts that have a strong associated odor, the effect could be quite dazzling and dislocating. It could also work the other way, creating a powerful negative emotional response. But either way, it likely would cause to reflect on the environment more mundane sensory stimuli as well, and develop a clearer picture of how those make us feel.

Scent graffiti is also fleeting, and that transience is appealing. So often graffiti is not about destruction but about reclamation: the desire to form some kind of personal relationship with the anonymously-designed city that contains and constrains us. To shape this looming environment in some small way. The evanescence of aroma allows for continually shifting scent-images to alter the city, allowing a constant redesign and rediscovery of public space.

Here’s a link to an instructable on how to create your own scent spray cans. Images: attack the darkness and circulating.

{via PSFK}

Squeezing brightly dressed performers into tight urban spaces, Companie Willi Dorner creates surprising living sculptures. Dorner aims to shift our perspective and cause us to reflect on the scale and structure of our environment. As much as the contrast between the rigid environment and flexible performers illuminates some basic truths about the design of buildings and spaces, I think the more interesting revelations relate to behavior.

Like the flash mobs I wrote about earlier this week, the behaviors force us to question the unspoken norms that govern behavior in a society. The positions and arrangements of the performers violate these norms in striking and significant ways. They’re too close together, they’re entwined and contorted, they’re upside down, they’re horizontal, they’re in places forbidden by law or general good taste to occupy. Encountering these behaviors reveals a second layer of structure in a city: an invisible structure formed by codes of behavior that work as well as fences or street markings to maintain our orderly coexistence. The photo below, of the blue-clad person upside-down against the gridded wall, shows this beautifully — an irreverent subversion of both kinds of order.

Something like this is a little piece of chaos, and it can be done in disturbing fashion, or it can be done whimsically. Clearly this is an example of the latter, with color a primary cue to the artist’s intent. There’s a real sense of play here, like a game of hide-and-seek (or in the first photo, sardines) being conducted in plain sight. It would be fun to witness, but I think out of anyone the greatest joy belongs the performers, who have license to indulge their inner child and color outside the lines for a day.

via PSFK

An email from a reader got me thinking again about joyful behavior. I’ve written before about joyful behavior in the form of random acts of kindness and other unexpected actions. These are often 1-to-1 or 1-to-many exchanges, and done with a certain level of intention.

Flash mobs are another form of joyful behavior, but rather than focusing on making one or a few people feel good, they’re focused on collective enjoyment at a large scale. For those who haven’t encountered this phenomenon, a flash mob is a public spectacle usually organized by email, Facebook, Twitter, text, and other social networking technologies and services. Flash mobs gather groups of random people to do unusual things, such as ride the subway with no pants on, host a subway station art gallery, have a pillow fight, blow bubbles, or do a huge coordinated dance routine. This phenomenon has become so popular that you can find more than a couple MJ-themed flash mobs with little effort, and lots of events that require at least a marginal suppression of dignity.

It may not always be in good taste, but it’s usually in good humor, and good fun if you’ve ever experienced one. My dad and I walked through Times Square during this year’s Bubble Battle, and felt first hand the joy of a place we know well entirely transformed by the odd, but welcome spectacle. Flash mobs are also a wonderful way to experience the contagiousness of joy in action. Watching the videos you first notice a few bewildered looks from the immediate passersby, followed by smiles and whispers to companions. Others, who may not have noticed the spectacle, see the reactions of those around them and snap to attention, and you can watch as the processing happens in their brains, and the smiles spread across their faces too. Like a water ripple, joy spreads outward in concentric waves. Confusion turns to delight, and then comes back in on itself, as people converge to get a closer look. Then cameras emerge and text messages are sent, propelling the ripple even wider.

When people talk about the rise of flash mobs, they always talk about social media. But social media are only the enabler; what interests me is the drive. Media are the how, not the why, and the why is an infinitely more interesting question. I believe the rise of these events is driven by a craving for joy in everyday life, a desire to let the inner child out to play in a way that feels free. It’s a drive for connection, for tactile experiences, for oddity among the homogenized landscape, for reprieve not just from recession but from all of the rigidities and pressures of adult life. It’s a desire to participate in something where the outcome is uncertain and unimportant, because the experience is about being in the moment. And it’s not just about being in moments, but about creating moments that are worth being in, more worth being in than moments spent in front of the TV or swiping your card at a cash register. It attracts people of all ages and lifestyles because this is a deeply human need.

It is a wonder when technology provides opportunities for the new satisfaction of emotional needs; but because emotional needs can be repressed, rechanneled, and hidden for long periods of time, their sudden satisfaction can make it look like they are new needs, rather than long-buried ones. Flash mobs, in their  absurd way, make us conscious of this latent craving for serendipity in our culture and ourselves.

For more on flash mobs:
NewMindSpace
ImprovEverywhere

Thank you to Riaz for the link to the Sound of Music flash mob and inspiration for this post

Yesterday I posted on miniature sweets and the perspective shift that comes from out-scaled items. On the opposite extreme, giant sweets seem to captivate artists and designers the world over. And because their enormity makes them impossible to overlook, the giant objects seem to have an even stronger Alice-in-Wonderland effect.

Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen’s Dropped Cone makes me feel like a Lilliputian living in a land where if I’m lucky, I might catch a dripping from a giant toddler’s melting ice cream. Martha Friedman’s Waffle (currently on view here in Brooklyn) and street artist Celso’s Apples have the similar effect of making me reconsider my own scale and the scale of all the common objects around me.

Of course, scale shifts can go both ways. Oversized objects can have the effect of making us feel ill at ease with our place in the universe and out of control of the events that shape our lives. Oldenburg and van Bruggen’s Knife Slicing Through Wall sculpture highlights this darker side of scale shifting. But sweets are inherently joyful — the sugar, the color, the aroma of baking, the ritual of eating — so giant treats create a much more pleasurable transformation of perspective: magical, childlike, and fun.

Brooklyn designer and studiomate of mine Azusa Hirota brings this whimsical quality to functional objects, allowing interaction with these giant sweets, instead of just viewing. Her chair, a giant cupcake, puts the user in between the cake and icing, so that you’re literally surrounded by the experience. Everyone I’ve seen sitting in it seems to have a big smile on their face. Her giant doughnut, designed in collaboration with Tawny Hixson, transforms a common inner tube into an object of delight. I remember my days spent tubing down the Nam Song river in Vang Vieng, Laos, and it strikes me that it would have been such a wonderful thing to see fellow travelers drifting gently downstream on giant Krispy Kremes!

See more of Azusa’s work here. Thank you Maggie, for the waffle tip that inspired the idea for this whole post!

Did I miss any wonderful giant sweets out there? Let me know.

I’m really enjoying this redux of the City of Melbourne identity by Landor Sydney. Some permutations remind me a little of the Andy Gilmore piece I posted last week. I especially appreciate that Landor shared the grid so we can see how they constructed the system. It’s a nice way of allowing one mark to express itself in different ways, bringing in lots of color and vibrancy without losing cohesion.

From an aesthetics of joy perspective, this sort of “theme and variation” identity makes a lot of sense. The theme keeps the whole thing recognizable, while the variations trigger a constant sense of surprise and anticipation. And it makes very good sense for a city, which is going to be applying the mark to everything from street signs to parking tickets. This is something people are going to be seeing a lot; it wouldn’t take long for them to get sick of a dull mark. Overall, I think it has a really great energy.

Outdoor art by Samuel Francois plays with contexts urban and rural using color and pattern. He considers himself “a joyful manipulator of symbols,” stating “his goal is above all to preach a transitory art of which spontaneity and decasualization of the images are the bases of the work.”

via Oh Joy!

The headlines have been comical. “Richard Perry in the Sky With Diamonds,” reads one. “Jeff Koons’s Blinding Bling,” blares another, calling out the controversy over hedge fund founder Richard Perry’s installation of a giant green diamond-shaped sculpture by Koons on the terrace of his penthouse apartment.

Art is a terribly subjective thing, which is how you get debates such as this one, which has led to myriad complaints and has even forced Perry to shift the direction of the sculpture to prevent light reflections from its mirror-polished surface from “burning like lasers” in a neighboring penthouse. (Ah, the problems of the very rich!)

You could argue an aesthetic of joy here — the oversized scale, the delicious shininess — though perhaps it’s not so layered as joy and may be more novelty than joy. My friend Deirdre says it makes her happy, though she can see how the neighbors might not be so thrilled. When private taste impinges on public eyeballs, the line between joyful and hideous can get awfully blurry. Is a work of art or a piece of decor still joyful if it bothers some to the point of agitation?

Colorful installation by Jessica Stockholder called Flooded Chambers Maid in Madison Square Park playing with the innate geometries of nature and the tension between man-made and natural in an urban park. Stockholder narrated a nice audio slide show offering her inspirations and interpretations. Not sure I’m feeling a cohesive logic here (the half-buried plastic drums?) but Madison Square Park is one of my favorite parks in the city (not just for Shake Shack) and I like the way this installation alters the energy of the space.

It departs this week so get there by Saturday if you want to check it out!

Thanks to Maggie for the tip.

Image: 16 Miles of String

An attempt to bring “joyous vibrancy” to the city is how Renzo Piano describes his plan to cloak the facades of the new Central Saint Giles development with brightly colored ceramic cladding. He says:

The colour idea came from observing the sudden surprise given by brilliant colours in that part of the city. Cities should not be boring or repetitive. One of the reasons cities are so beautiful and a great idea, is that they are full of surprises, the idea of colour represents a joyful surprise.

Against the muted, often grey backdrop of the London cityscape, I think it would be a joy to walk around the corner and be surprised by the delicious glossiness of red or yellow glazed ceramic. They have the rich sensory appeal of the ripe-apple red double-decker buses or the mailboxes or the Beefeater uniforms. The yellow is like a bright umbrella or a pair of wellies in a storm. These oases of color are arguably more important in London life because of the climate. It will be interesting to see public response to these when they are up.

Thanks Maggie for the tip!

More info and images here.