Helen Drutt

The other day I had the privilege of meeting gallery owner, professor, and jewelry and crafts collector Helen Drutt. My good friend Debra Rapoport has been exhibiting in Helen's shows for years, and she knew that she was a perfect candidate for Advanced Style.

The dirty politics of taste

Charles Jencks will join Sean Griffiths, Charles Holland, and Sam Jacob of FAT on Monday, October 31st, at the Architectural Association, celebrating Halloween with a discussion of "radical postmodernism" and launching their new, co-edited issue of AD.

That issue "marks the resurgence of a critical architecture that engages in a far-reaching way with issues of taste, space, character and ornament. Bridging high and low cultures," the editors explain, radical postmodernism "immerses itself in the age of information, embracing meaning and communication, embroiling itself in the dirty politics of taste by drawing ideas from beyond the narrow confines of architecture. It is a multi-dimensional, amorphous category, which is heavily influenced by contemporary art, cultural theory, modern literature and everyday life."

The event is free and open to the public, and kicks off at 6pm.

All in The Details

When its comes to style, any advanced fashionista will tell you that it's all in the details. The right accessories can add a touch of glamor and elegance to any outfit.

Dye-Tracing Archaeology

Toxic chemicals leaking from an old wastewater treatment plant in Alabama have unexpectedly led to the discovery of a 1,700-year old "pre-historic village" buried in the ground nearby. Chemicals "have seeped into the ground surrounding the old plant," according to a local news station, so "the soil needs to be removed and taken to a toxic waste facility."

However, a survey of the contaminated site soon revealed that the ground also contained extremely well-preserved artifacts "from a village that once thrived" there. "Lo and behold," the head excavator remarked to the news show: "we found a massive late-middle Woodland period village."

It's not hard to imagine someone another 1,700 years from now accidentally discovering the forgotten city of, say, New York—or Chicago, or Bangkok, swallowed by mud—after a chemical leak at a nearby factory: radioactive liquids drain down through the topsoil, flowing around buried walls and ruins, forming iridescent pools on floors in basements—slow and toxic streams tracing the shapes of old stairways, lighting a path for future excavation and descent. Like giving the earth a radiopharmaceutical, you fire up a ground-scanning machine, trace the pollution underground, and, lo and behold, the dark outlines of buried cities start to glow.

[Images: Dye-tracing cave systems; note that the chemical used is supposedly non-toxic].

In fact, I'm reminded of dye-tracing techniques used for mapping otherwise impenetrable or overly complex cave systems. In James Tabor's wildly uneven 2010 book Blind Descent, for instance, we read about legendary caver Alexander Klimchouk, who set about dye-tracing caves on the Arabika Massif, including Krubera Cave, currently the deepest known cave in the world.

"In 1984 and 1985," Tabor explains, "[Klimchouk] poured fluorescein dye into several caves, including Krubera, high on the Arabika. Traces of that dye later flowed out of springs on the shore of the Black Sea far below. More traces tinged the water 400 feet beneath the surface of the Black Sea, miles offshore," indicating genuinely—in fact, record-breakingly—huge dimensions for the overall system of caves.

[Images: Dye-tracing caves].

But even the most remote, fictional possibility that future spelunking archaeologists might someday map lost cities—London, Moscow, Beijing, Rome—by using dye-tracing packs to illuminate that underground world of collapsed halls and buried rooms is extraordinary. Cartographers in mountaineering gear and helmet-mounted floodlights descend into the New York subway system in 5,161 A.D., following luminescent trails of fluorescein dye, crawling, walking, rappelling into the underworld on the trail of shining rivers as subterranean ruins begin to shine.

(Alabama story found via @ArchaeologyTime).

Advanced Style Interiors

The ladies of Advanced Style are not only masters of style, but they are great interior decorators as well.Here are some shots and outtakes from a shoot for me.style magazine in Germany. It was great fun shooting these wonderfully stylish women in their own environments.

El Resplandor

[Image: "Meelas Yadee" (2005-2006) by Lamya Gargash].

Nettle's newest album, El Resplandor: The Shining in Dubai, released last month by Sub Rosa, comes with an awesome premise: it is a speculative soundtrack for an unmade remake of Stanley Kubrick's film, The Shining, set in a mothballed luxury hotel in Dubai. It is sonic architecture fiction.

Less a horror film, however, than its predecessor, Nettle's version seems instead to offer a melancholy audio glimpse of a world in decline: the album's family lost in circumstances far too large—and too alienating, too foreign—to comprehend fully, unraveling alone in the hotel's empty rooms and hallways.

[Image: "Fatima's Kitchen Cupboard" (2005-2006) by Lamya Gargash].

El Resplandor's liner notes feature these photographs by Lamya Gargash, depicting extravagantly furnished rooms in afternoon darkness, empty kitchens, halls, and ruined stairways in the UAE.

As the artist herself explains, many of the houses seen here "are recently vacant, whereas others have been deserted for a long time. There were some houses that still had people living in them when I started my project; the families residing there were preparing to move to newer homes." Many more images from the series can be found here.

[Images: (top) "Blue Purple Chair" (2005-2006) and (bottom) "The Staircase" (2005-2006) by Lamya Gargash].

Jace Clayton and Lindsay Cuff of Nettle will be at Thrilling Wonder Stories 3 on Friday afternoon, October 28th, to talk about the album, the entirety of which will be streamed throughout the day.

[Image: "Mona Lisa" (2005-2006) by Lamya Gargash].

Stop by if you're in the area, not only to learn more about the concept behind the album—after all, there's something highly compelling about the idea of a speculative soundtrack for an unmade remake (perhaps this could be the first soundtrack optioned by Hollywood for a film it later serves to score)—but also about the technical set-up used by the band during studio production and live sets. Nettle's more sonically aggressive earlier work, Build a Fort, Set that On Fire, is also worth a listen in the meantime.

Matching Vintage Hat and Coat

I try and feature a little bit of everything on Advanced Style. I am drawn to people who have a strong spirit and pronounced sense of personal style. Style is the starting point to a greater conversation on aging gracefully,creatively, and full of vitality. One day you may see a woman with pink hair, or an outrageous hat, while the next day I'll feature an elegant lady who prefers more classic styling. I photograph whoever catches my eye each day, and am always on the look out for great style and great stories.

Pink Fringe Hat

I met Piazza at the Stephen Jones exhibit wearing a stunning silver hat and grey coat. She came all the way from Detroit to hear Mr. Jones speak, and see some of his marvelous hats on display. Piazza is wearing one of her own creations above, a favorite of her customers in Detroit.

Thrilling Wonder Stories 3

Since 2009, an annual Thrilling Wonder Stories event has taken place at the Architectural Association in London, bringing people together from multiple disciplines to explore the spaces between fiction, science, and design.

On one hand, these events take the form of an extended look into the role of architectural spaces—including real buildings, but also film sets, computer game environments, and spatial simulations—in propelling, staging, catalyzing, or otherwise framing narrative storylines. This requires speaking not only to architects, but to novelists, game developers, screenwriters, film set designers, and even Hollywood directors to discuss their own particular requirements for, and relationships to, the built environment—but also to ask, more specifically, how the spaces they design, describe, feature, or build affect the development of narrative.

This is the cultural dimension of the event—the "wonder stories."

On the other hand, Thrilling Wonder Stories has also looked both to science and science fiction as resources of ideas that might play spatial roles in future design projects—where I use the word spatial, not architectural, very deliberately, so as not to limit this to a discussion of buildings. This means bringing in robot makers and biologists, geologists and geneticists, not to ask them about architecture but simply to learn about their work. The point, in other words, is not to extract architectural ideas from their research—as if fully formed building programs could somehow be pulled from a presentation about synthetic organisms—but simply to add to the overall mix of scientific (and science fictional) ideas available for reference in future design conversations.

This is the "thrilling wonder" side of the series.

[Images: Photos from Thrilling Wonder Stories 2 at the Architectural Association].

To date, Liam Young, the event's co-organizer, and I have hosted comics author Warren Ellis, architect Sir Peter Cook of Archigram, game critic Jim Rossignol, TED Fellow and architectural biologist Rachel Armstrong, novelists Will Self and Jeff VanderMeer, spatial provocateurs Ant Farm, designer Matt Webb of BERG, and more than a dozen other figures from the worlds of film, gaming, architecture, literature, engineering, science, interaction design, and more.

[Image: From "Animal Superpowers" by Chris Woebken and Kenichi Okada; Woebken will be speaking at Thrilling Wonder Stories 3 at Studio-X NYC].

This year, we're trying out an ambitious new format. Not only are we teaming up with Popular Science magazine as our media partner and co-organizer—so watch for content on popsci.com in the lead up to and during the event—but we are leading two simultaneous events: one at the Architectural Association in London, the other across the pond at Studio-X NYC.

So, on Friday, October 28th, Thrilling Wonder Stories 3—sponsored by the Architectural Association, Studio-X NYC, and Popular Science—kicks off in London with a truly phenomenal line-up. It's an all day blow-out, lasting from noon to 10pm, featuring:

VINCENZO NATALI*
Director of Cube, Splice, and forthcoming feature films based on J.G. Ballard’s High-Rise and Neuromancer by William Gibson

BRUCE STERLING
Scifi author, commentator, and futurist

KEVIN SLAVIN
Game designer and theorist of "how algorithms shape our world"

ANDREW LOCKLEY
Academy Award-winning visual effects supervisor for Inception, compositing/2D supervisor for Batman Begins and Children of Men

PHILIP BEESLEY
Digital media artist and experimental architect

CHRISTIAN LORENZ SCHEURER
Concept artist and illustrator for computer games and films such as The Matrix, Dark City, The Fifth Element, and Superman Returns

CHARLIE TUESDAY GATES
Taxidermy artist and sculptor—to lead a live taxidermy workshop

DR. RODERICH GROSS AND THE NATURAL ROBOTICS LAB
Head of the Natural Robotics Lab at the University of Sheffield—to lead a live Swarm Robotics demonstration

GAVIN ROTHERY
Concept artist for Duncan Jones's film Moon

GUSTAV HOEGEN
Animatronics engineer for Hellboy, Clash of the Titans, and Ridley Scott’s forthcoming film Prometheus

JULIAN BLEECKER
Designer, technologist, and researcher at the Los Angeles-based Near Future Laboratory

RADIO SCIENCE ORCHESTRA
Theremin-led electro-acoustic ensemble

SPOV
Motion graphics artists for Discovery Channel’s Future Weapons and Project Earth

ZELIG SOUND
Music, composition, and sound design for film and television

Better yet, Matt Jones of the ultra-talented design studio BERG will join Liam Young to serve as co-host for the day. Here's a map for how to get there; the event is free but space is limited.

[Image: "Glass Weed" from Super-Natural Garden by Simone Ferracina; Ferracina will be speaking at Thrilling Wonder Stories 3 at Studio-X NYC].

That same day—Friday, October 28th—over at Studio-X NYC, Thrilling Wonder Stories 3 will kick off at 1pm local time, lasting till 4 or 4:30pm. Speaking that day are:

NICHOLAS DE MONCHAUX
Architect and author of Spacesuit: Fashioning Apollo

HARI KUNZRU
Novelist and author of Gods Without Men, Transmission, and The Impressionist

BJARKE INGELS
Architect, WSJ Magazine 2011 architectural innovator of the year, and author of Yes Is More: An Archicomic on Architectural Evolution

SETH FLETCHER
Science writer, senior editor of Popular Science, and author of Bottled Lightning: Superbatteries, Electric Cars, and the New Lithium Economy

JACE CLAYTON AND LINDSAY CUFF OF NETTLE
Nettle’s new album, El Resplandor, is a speculative soundtrack for an unmade remake of The Shining, set in a luxury hotel in Dubai

[Image: One of many evolutionary robotic research projects by Hod Lipson, featured in this PDF; Lipson will be speaking at Thrilling Wonder Stories 3 at Studio-X NYC].

Then, Saturday, October 29th, everything comes to a close with an epic second day—from 2-7pm—at Studio-X NYC, featuring:

JAMES FLEMING
Historian and author of Fixing The Sky: The Checkered History of Weather and Climate Control

MARC KAUFMAN
Science writer for the Washington Post and author of First Contact: Scientific Breakthroughs in the Hunt for Life Beyond Earth

ANDREW BLUM
Journalist and author of Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet

DAVID BENJAMIN
Architect and co-director of The Living

DEBBIE CHACHRA
Researcher and educator in biological materials and engineering design, featured in Wired UK's 2010 "Year In Ideas"

HOD LIPSON
Researcher in evolutionary robotics and the future of 3D printing at Cornell University

CARLOS OLGUIN
Designer at Autodesk Research working on the intersection of bio-nanotechnology and 3D visualization

CHRIS WOEBKEN
Interaction designer

SIMONE FERRACINA
Architect, winner of the 2011 Animal Architecture Awards, and author of Organs Everywhere

DAVE GRACER
Insect agriculturalist at Small Stock Foods

MORRIS BENJAMINSON
Bioengineer of in-vitro edible muscle protein and CEO of Zymotech Enterprises

ANDREW HESSEL
Science writer and open-source biologist, focusing on bacterial genomics

The events in New York will be moderated by myself, Studio-X NYC co-director Nicola Twilley, and PopSci senior associate editor Ryan Bradley. In both locations, events are free and open to the public; however, if you plan on attending the Studio-X NYC event, please register as limited space will be available. Here's a map.

[Image: The "plastic" extruded by New England's Colletes inaequalis bees; photo by Debbie Chachra].

Finally, if you can't make it in person, consider following Thrilling Wonder Stories on Twitter—and keep your eye out at the end of summer 2012, for the Thrilling Wonder Stories book, published by the Architectural Association.

But I hope to see some of you there!

*Vincenzo Natali will be speaking via Skype.

100 Year Old Ruth Lifting Weights

Ruth,100, lifting weights, in a favorite pair of gloves

Joyce, 80,with some of her favorite vintage Chanel accessories

A few months ago I shot an editorial for a German fashion magazine called me.style with some of the ladies and gentleman from Advanced Style. I was one of five photographers chosen to work on a story about "Fashion and Fame", and the only one to use models over 40. Check out 100 year old Ruth lifting weights in a pair of her favorite gloves, and Joyce 80, wearing some of her best vintage accessories. I was honored to work on this project. I hope the photos above inspire you to dress up and stay active, no matter how old you are.

How to Wear a Floral Coat

I saw this woman on the Upper West Side, on my way to hear a talk by Stephen Jones. She looked stunning in her floral coat, a perfect color palette for Fall!

Eye Roller

[Image: The GroundBot system by Rotundus].

The GroundBot system by Swedish firm Rotundus is a remote-controlled, all-weather polycarbonate sphere that "can trundle through snow, mud and sand as it supplies a live feed via a pair of cameras," Wired UK explains. "Its operator sees the image in 3D on a screen."

It apparently comes with knobby treads or without.

[Image: The GroundBot system by Rotundus].

The sphere is currently "undergoing trials" with the Swedish Defense Forces for use "in airports and other locations in need of surveillance," but the system also has potential applications in urban mapping, remote terrain exploration, and even post-disaster search and rescue. While the GroundBot can only reach speeds a bit more than 6mph—which means it won't be breaking any speed records, and it certainly won't be hard to outrun—the idea that failed criminals of the future might be seen sprinting away from swarms of autonomous black spheres the size of car tires is quite extraordinary.

[Images: The GroundBot system by Rotundus on patrol].

See the Rotundus site for more info.

Advanced Style on Brazilian TV

My Advanced Style party with Tavi was just featured on Brazil's popular fashion program GNT.Check out the video above, which includes wonderful interviews with some of your favorite ladies.

The New Old Hollywood Glamor:Turbans

I have always admired the glamor of Old Hollywood. When I was a kid my grandma and I would watch old movies together, and I was struck by the style of ladies like Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo,Bettie Davis and Grace Kelly. The ladies I photograph are a reminder that glamor is always in style. Turbans are not only one of my favorite accessories to photograph,they are also an easy and practical way to add a bit of vintage style into any wardrobe.

Film Grenade

[Image: The "Throwable Panoramic Ball Camera" by Jonas Pfeil].

The "Throwable Panoramic Ball Camera," designed by Jonas Pfeil as part of his thesis project at the Technical University of Berlin, creates spherical panoramas after being thrown into the air.

The camera "captures an image at the highest point of flight—when it is hardly moving." It "takes full spherical panoramas, requires no preparation and images are taken instantaneously. It can capture scenes with many moving objects without producing ghosting artifacts and creates unique images." You can see it at work in this video:



Pfeil explains in detail:

Our camera uses 36 fixed-focus 2 megapixel mobile phone camera modules. The camera modules are mounted in a robust, 3D-printed, ball-shaped enclosure that is padded with foam and handles just like a ball. Our camera contains an accelerometer which we use to measure launch acceleration. Integration lets us predict rise time to the highest point, where we trigger the exposure. After catching the ball camera, pictures are downloaded in seconds using USB and automatically shown in our spherical panoramic viewer. This lets users interactively explore a full representation of the captured environment.

It's easy enough to imagine such a thing being mass-produced and taken up by the Lomo crowd; but it seems equally likely that such a technology could be put to use aiding military operations in urbanized terrain, with otherwise disoriented squad leaders tossing "robust" optical grenades up above dividing walls and blocked streets to see what lies beyond.

Either way, a throwable camera strong enough to withstand bad weather and strong bounces—and able to store hundreds of images—sounds like an amazing way to start documenting the urban landscape. In fact, the very idea that a "photograph" would thus correspond to a spherical sampling of all the objects and events in a given area adds an intriguing spatial dimension to the act of creating images. It's a kind of reverse-firework: rather than release light into the sky, it steals traces of the light it finds there.

(Spotted via Popular Photography).

Vintage YSL in Central Park

I saw this woman wearing a vintage YSL suit in Central Park over the weekend.She told me that she bought her suit over 20 years at Bergdorf's and that it is still one of her favorites. When I asked what her style philosophy was she replied,"First of all whatever is inside of you you have to believe in beauty. Beauty is harmony and harmony is the whole purpose of the universe."

The Colorful Life of Zoya

A few days ago I posted a picture of 72 year old Zoya dressed all in black. Here she is again in a much brighter dress and floral sweater. What first drew me to photograph Zoya, was her confidence and beautiful spirit. Style isn't only about the clothes we wear, but also how we carry and express ourselves. Zoya's lives a colorful life filled with music, art, and fashion. Her style is a reflection of her rich appreciation of culture and beauty.

Do Black Swans Dream of Electric Sheep?

In just a few hours here at Studio-X NYC—an off-campus event space and urban futures think tank run by Columbia's GSAPP—we'll be hosting a live interview with Ilona Gaynor. Gaynor is a London-based concept artist, filmmaker, and multimedia designer, as well as the most recent recipient of the Ridley Scott Associates award, where she currently serves as artist-in-residence.

As Gaynor explains it, her work "largely consists of artificially constructed spaces, systems and atmospheres navigated through fictional scenarios," her intention being "to intensify, fantasize and aestheticize the darker, invisible reaches of political, economical and technological progress. Grounded in rigorous research, consultation and collaboration," she continues, "my aim is to reveal these worlds by exploring the imaginary limits within them both as critique and speculative pleasure."

Most of Gaynor's work has a strong financial bent, as you'll notice from her portfolio, whether it's the photographic series "Corporate Heaven," a research project on insurance and risk, the short film Suspicion Builds Confidence, or even a "fictional artifact designed for the corporate world of tomorrow."

Her most recent short film, Everything Ends In Chaos, embedded at the start of this post, presents "a mixed-media collection of objects, narrative texts and films that reveal the intricate trajectories of an artificially designed and reverse engineered Black Swan event." A Black Swan, in Gaynor's telling of it, based on the economic work of Nassim Nicholas Taleb, is the idea that humans "are collectively and individually blind to uncertainty, and therefore often unaware of the impact that singular events can have on [their] lives: economically, historically and scientifically, until after their occurrence." Her film is thus an attempt to "reverse-engineer" such an event, piecing together chaos from order; the film's backstory, which is unfortunately quite hard to detect from the imagery alone, involves an elaborate kidnapping plot, stolen jewels force-fed to doves (which then escape from their cage and fly away), and an actuarial committee in charge of insuring against this event.

In another work, nature—that is, non-human lifeforms, especially plants—has become so expensive and, thus, so out of reach for everyday workers—in Gaynor's future, for example, a single Ficus tree costs £450,000—that indulging in any interaction with the natural world becomes an experience of "unapologetic decadence." That film, 120 Seconds of Future, is embedded below:



Gaynor kicks things off at 7pm tonight—Wednesday, 12 October—to be followed by an open Q&A. We'll be at Studio-X NYC, 180 Varick Street, Suite 1610. Here's a map.

Unfortunately, I have to ask that you RSVP, if possible, to studioxnyc at gmail dot com—but I hope to see some of you there!

(More on Studio-X NYC, earlier on BLDGBLOG).

Tom Ford Glasses

Ask any of the Advanced Style ladies, and they will tell you that a great pair of glasses can really make an outfit. Whether cat eye like the woman above or big and round like our friend Iris Apfel, the right glasses can personalize your look!