A MEMORY IS a mutable thing. One moment it’s in our minds, hard as concrete. The next, it’s still there, yet different. With each passing day, the outline of what we remember softens; the veracity of what we’ve experienced gradually takes on a surreal filter.
The poignancy of this fact—that memories transform with time—is a frequent source of inspiration for artists and designers, who have long grappled with how to best convey the tenuous relationship between reality and perception. A new typeface called Memoire is designed to reflect the ever-shifting shapes memories take as we replay them in our minds. Designers Ryan Bugden and Michelle Wainer created the custom typeface for La Petite Mort, a biannual magazine produced by New York creative agency Sub Rosa. The font, used as the headline typeface for each of the magazine’s 16 stories, evolves from page to page. “The core idea was that it would change over time—similar to how every time you revisit a memory, it in fact changes based on the current context you’re in,” Wainer says.
It’s hard to see the changes at first. The sharpness of the serifs softens almost imperceptibly with every use. On the first page, edges are knife-like; by the last, they are almost friendly in their roundness. “The experience we had in mind was very subtle, something you feel before you notice,” Bugden says.
Memoire is loosely based on De Vinne, a peculiar metal typeface Gustav Schroeder designed in the 19th century. In the days of metal type, degradation was an inevitable part of the process. Every time a letter was pressed, its edges softened “like eroding mountains,” Wainer says. Of course, this process played out more gradually than it does with Memoire, where the degeneration is guided and intentional, facilitated by technology.
Bugden started by drawing two master fonts: The first a crisp-edged serif, the latter, a softer variation. From there he used software to generate fonts two through 15, which change by subtle degrees. Any alteration to the intermediary stages required a change to the master fonts.
At first, it appears that the typefaces increase in weight, but that’s not so. “What’s interesting about this typeface is it’s not the weight of the typeface we’re looking at, it’s the quality of the curves,” he says.
Memoire was designed for print, though it lives beautifully as a digital file, where you can see the transformation in hyper speed. Reading it in print is more of an exercise in perception, and in many ways, the typeface is a metaphor for memory layered upon yet another metaphor: By its very nature, the print page blurs and fades, each time it’s touched.
When you walk into the Kitchen to watch “For Claude Shannon,” the work’s four dancers are already onstage, warming up. In addition to the usual limbering, though, they appear to be thinking especially hard, going over something in their heads. According to the program note, that’s exactly what they’re doing: preparing to perform a long and complicated dance they’ve only just learned.
“For Claude Shannon” is named after the mathematical engineer who connected symbolic logic with electronic circuits. Liz Santoro and Pierre Godard have devised a lexicon of 24 movements for arms and legs. Before each performance, a sequence (“one of nearly 30 billion possible sequences”) is generated using the syntactic structure of a sentence by Shannon. The performers, who include Ms. Santoro, have two hours to learn it.
The dance, which had its premiere on Thursday as part of the Kitchen’s “From Minimalism Into Algorithm” series, looks like the output of a fairly simple computer program. In a mechanically even rhythm, arms are raised and lowered semaphorically, feet are extended and retracted, but elbows and knees are rarely bent. Because of the reliance on a small, set vocabulary, the dancers’ orientation — which direction each is facing, in relation to the others — assumes greater importance. The work is not about the steps. The dancers go in and out of unison, revealing a logic. Sometimes they stop, but the sequence continues.
At first, all this occurs in silence. But Greg Beller’s electronic score introduces an airplane hum and static and then random clicks that resolve into a metronomic beat; the beat slowly accelerates, acquires rumbling bass and eventually compounds into a polyrhythmic dance track.
The dance follows a similar process as the performers lock in to the beat and the acceleration imparts some drama and suspense: Will the machine go too fast? Yet, although the dance loosens, it doesn’t break out nearly as far as the music: a few kicks, hops, arabesques. Where the dancers resembled automatons before, now they admit inklings of human individuality. The hips of Marco D’Agostin sway as if he can’t hold them back any longer. The dancers’ faces show strain, a mental effort one might (wrongly) fail to associate with dance. On Ms. Santoro’s face, there’s occasionally a hint of a smile, as if this exercise, which holds a viewer’s attention, gives her pleasure.
“The development of sensibility is the most important thing for children and adults alike, but is much more possible for children…. Adults are very busy, taught to run all the time. You…
Although studies of the psychology of the optimal creative environment indicate that some artists and writers thrive when surrounded by stimulation, most creative work requires unburdened space and uninterrupted time for what Mary Oliver calls “that wild, silky part of ourselves” — also known by its commonplace name, inspiration — to reveal itself.
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“An inspiration is a happy moment that takes us by surprise.
Many people are so startled by an inspiration or a condition of inspiration, which is so different from daily care, that they think that they are unique in having had it. Nothing could be further from the truth. Inspiration is there all the time for anyone whose mind is not covered over with thoughts and concerns, and [it is] used by everyone whether they realize it or not.
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“It is an untroubled state of mind. Of course, we know that an untroubled state of mind cannot last, so we say that inspiration comes and goes, but it is there all the time waiting for us to be untroubled again. We can therefore say that it is pervasive.”
In a sentiment that echoes and adds dimension to Picasso’s famous proclamation that every child is an artist, Martin considers how our relationship with inspiration evolves over the course of a lifetime:
“Young children have more time in which they are untroubled than adults. They have therefore more inspirations than adults. The moments of inspiration added together make what we refer to as sensibility — defined in the dictionary as “response to higher feelings.” The development of sensibility is the most important thing for children and adults alike, but is much more possible for children.”
But inspiration, Martin argues, cannot be controlled or willed — it can only be surrendered to. She illustrates this by way of the child:
“What is the experience of the small child in the dirt? He suddenly feels happy, rolls in the dirt probably, feels free, laughs and runs and falls. His face is shining… “The light was extraordinary, the feeling was extraordinary” is the way in which many adults describe moments of inspiration. Although they have had them all their lives they never really recall them and are always taken by surprise. Adults are very busy, taught to run all the time. You cannot run and be very aware of your inspirations.”
It’s a sentiment that pierces our modern condition and calls Kierkegaard to mind — as he contemplated our greatest source of unhappiness more than a century earlier, the Danish philosopher lamented: “Of all ridiculous things the most ridiculous seems to me, to be busy — to be a man who is brisk about his food and his work.” To counter this ridiculousness, Martin urges artists to create a sanctuary for inspiration — a space devoid of busyness and dedicated to unburdened clarity of mind, with “no telephone,” where one is “to be disturbed only if the house is burning.” A century and a half after Delacroix admonished against social distractions in creative work, she counsels aspiring artists:
“A studio is not a place in which to talk to friends. You will hate your friends if they destroy the atmosphere of your studio. As an artist you will have to try and live with inspiration. You are not like the little boy in the dirt free and open. The whole world which you now know intrudes. It is almost hopeless to expect clarity of mind. It is hopeless if your studio atmosphere cannot be preserved.”
But there is one kind of person who should be allowed, even invited, into the artist’s studio — the kind that calls to mind Patti Smith’s notion of those who magnify your spirit. Martin writes:
“There are some people to be allowed into the studio, however, who will not destroy the atmosphere but will bring encouragement and who are an absolute necessity in the field of art. They are not personal friends. Personal friends are a different thing entirely and should be met in cafés. They are Friends of Art.
Friends of art are people with very highly developed sensibilities whose inspiration leads them to devote their lives to the promotion of art work and to bringing it before the public.”
Such “friends of art,” Martin argues, bring with them a highly attuned intuition — intuition being, of course, merely the accretion of experience-encoded discernment — which can help guide the artist closer to his or her own truth:
“When they come to see the work it is not to judge it but to enjoy it… When these friends of art come to your studio they should be treated as honored guests, otherwise you will destroy the atmosphere of your studio yourself. If you are not ready to do this, be sure to wait till you are ready. The premature showing of work when you are perhaps struggling and even fighting is an unnecessary suffering. You will know when you are really ready.”
Because the studio should be a sacred space for the untroubled mind, Martin recommends avoiding physical clutter in order to prevent mental clutter:
“You must clean and arrange your studio in a way that will forward a quiet state of mind. This cautious care of atmosphere is really needed to show respect for the work. Respect for art work and everything connected with it, one’s own and that of everyone else, must be maintained and forwarded. No disrespect, carelessness or ego [and] selfishness must be allowed to interfere if it can be prevented. Indifference and antagonism are easily detected — you should take such people out immediately. Just turning the paintings to the wall is not enough. You yourself should not go to your studio in an indifferent or fighting mood.”
China has released a directive that could put an end to the country’s trend for bombastic architecture.
Just over a year after president Xi Jinping called for an end to “weird architecture”, the country’s State Council has released a document calling for all new buildings to be “suitable, economic, green and pleasing to the eye”, according to the South China Morning Post.
The directive is aimed at tackling the problems associated with the rapid expansion of Chinese cities, as well as increased urbanisation all over the country.
It states that cities will no longer be allowed to grow beyond what their resources can support, and that “oversized, xenocentric and weird” buildings will be forbidden. It also bans gated communities and non-permitted developments.
Xi’s original comments, made in late 2014, attacked projects including the Rem Koolhaas-designed CCTV headquarters in Beijing – one of many unusually shaped projects resulting from China’s construction boom.
Shenzhen architect Feng Guochuan told the New York Times that Xi’s criticism had already influenced local government decisions regarding new projects. “Generally speaking, local governments now tend to approve more conservative designs,” he said.
But the new directive comes as a result of a meeting held by the State Council two months ago – the first of its kind since 1978.
It reportedly stipulates that, instead of unusual architecture, simple modular constructions will be encouraged, and predicts that 30 percent of new buildings will be prefabricated in 10 years time.
Not only will new gated communities be banned, but existing ones will apparently be opened up to improve traffic flow.
Existing shantytowns and dilapidated houses are expected to be transformed, with more parks and green areas created.
Speaking to Dezeen last year, Zaha Hadid Architects director Patrik Schumacher said that work was already drying up in China for foreign architects, partly because the government was trying to promote more local talent.
The firm had previously enjoyed a long run of success in China, delivering projects including the Guangzhou Opera House and the vast Galaxy Soho development in Beijing.
“I feel that there is this attempt by the Chinese leadership to try to make itself more independent and rely on its own talent,” Schumacher said.
For a long time, the way philanthropy worked was simple: Rich people gave their money to museums and churches and opera houses and Harvard. Their names went up on buildings, charities gave them made-up awards, their grandkids went to rehab, the Earth went around the sun.
But philanthropy is changing. Today’s billionaires are less interested in legacy institutions, less obsessed with prestige and perpetuity. Part of this is a function of their age: In 2012, 4 percent of America’s biggest charitable donations were made by people under 50 years old. In 2014, a quarter of them were.
The other factor driving the new philanthropists is how they earned their money in the first place. Last year, six of the 10 largest charitable donations in the United States came from the tech sector, solidifying Silicon Valley’s place as the epicenter of the newer, bigger, disrupty-er philanthropy. There, tech billionaires form “giving circles” to share leads on promising charities, and they hire the same consultants to vet them. They use terms like “hacker philanthropy” and “effective altruism.” These guys—they are mostly guys—believe that they became successful businessmen by upending existing institutions, by scaling simple ideas, by “breaking shit.” And, with few exceptions, that is how they plan to become successful philanthropists, too.
All of this became much more relevant in December, when Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, announced that they were giving 99 percent of their wealth to charity. The total amount they pledged, around $45 billion in Facebook shares at current valuation, exceeds the endowments of the Rockefeller, Ford and Carnegie foundations combined. If Zuckerberg gives away the upper limit of what he announced in December, $1 billion per year for the next three years, he will likely become the world’s second-largest charitable donor after Bill Gates. He is 31 years old.
Zuckerberg’s ability to remake the world in his own image, in his own lifetime, is unprecedented. Andrew Carnegie opened his first library when he was 68, and only managed to get around $5 billion in today’s dollars out the door before he died. John D. Rockefeller, generally considered the most generous industrialist in history, launched his foundation when he was 76, and only gave away around half his fortune. If he wanted to, Zuckerberg could eradicate polio, or de-neglect half a dozen tropical diseases, or fix all the water pipes in Flint, or give $9,000 to every single one of the world’s refugees.
But $45 billion, as a former Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation grantee put it, is “a 1,000-pound gorilla.” You don’t give away that much money without changing the places and institutions and people you give it to, sometimes for the worse.
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the hard part about social change “is that it doesn’t scale like a social network.”
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Nearly every social advance in history has technology somewhere near the center of it—the aqueduct, the steam train, the birth control pill. And whenever you start asking people about the life-altering potential of Mark Elliot Zuckerberg and the tech-based philanthropy he represents, the first words you’re likely to hear are “The Green Revolution.”
In 1975, nearly three out of five people in Asia lived on less than $1 a day. Rains at the wrong time of year meant the difference between starvation and survival. Then, researchers funded by the Ford and Rockefeller foundations created new crops—varieties that grew taller, needed less water and could be planted year-round. Over the next 30 years, this innovation radically improved the lives of hundreds of millions of people. Rice yields spiked by 1,000 percent. Wheat got cheaper, healthier and more abundant. Norman Borlaug, the scientist who developed the new wheat varieties, won the Nobel Prize.
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“Technology,” Toyama says, “is the easiest part of any solution.” The hard part is everything that comes afterward. Take car crashes, which kill more people every year than tuberculosis or pulmonary disease. The technology to prevent these deaths—seat belts, motorcycle helmets—is not rocket science. It’s just that no one has figured out how to make it appeal to the people who need it, especially in the developing world, where 90 percent of these deaths occur.
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he should acknowledge that the silver-bullet promise of technology only works at changing the world when it’s combined with political will and popular demand. Until he finds a way to engineer those (please don’t), he should focus on the small ways, at the margins, where technology can improve people’s lives, 8 percent at a time.
In 2001, the Gates Foundation gave PATH and the World Health Organization $70 million, 10 years and a simple objective: Develop a vaccine for meningitis A and make it affordable for every single person who needs it.
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Marc LaForce headed the team in charge of bringing the vaccine to market. He says it wasn’t just the scale of the Gates donation that mattered, but its duration. In those days, most grants were capped at two or three years, with check-ins every six months. Years of work could be wiped away if a donor decided progress was moving too slowly and pulled out.
“If you want to do something major,” LaForce says, “you need the ability to go two steps forward, then one step back.”
Plus, the Gates team left LaForce alone. Back then, the foundation only employed about a dozen people who worked out of a small office in a residential neighborhood of Seattle. Staffers spent their time making lists of diseases, ranking them by annual fatalities, then calling around to find out which ones were closest to being cured.
“We didn’t need to be specialists,” says Gordon Perkin, the foundation’s first director of global health. “We just needed to know which organizations had the judgment and the infrastructure, and we gave them money.”
This story doesn’t just illustrate the potential of philanthropy. It also demonstrates that how Zuckerberg gives away his money will be just as important as what he gives it to. Because one way to look at his $45 billion is that it’s a lot of money. Another way to look at it is that it’s about what the United States spends on prisons every six months. Or education every four weeks. Or health care every five days. Even at a scale that large, efficiency matters.
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The Gates Foundation, as it’s expanded to more than 1,300 employees, has become prone to the same bloat, the same “expert-itis,” as a former grantee calls it. “They hired Ph.D.s in biotech and all they wanted to do was the science that the grantees were doing.”
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It’s hard to overstate just how un-Silicon Valley all of this is. “Money is sitting there to make the world a better place, and to dole it out cautiously is antithetical to why it’s there,” says Freada Kapor Klein, a partner at the Kapor Center for Social Impact, a foundation set up by Mitch Kapor, an early investor in Uber and other unicorns.
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Zuckerberg shouldn’t be afraid to fail; he should approach philanthropy like a venture capitalist, testing out ideas to scale up later on. Bypassing legacy institutions is what Silicon Valley CEOs are good at, right? All those consultants must strike them as the charity equivalent of taxi medallions.
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What Zuckerberg actually announced last December wasn’t a big fat donation to charity. All he did was establish a limited liability company (LLC) and issue a promise that he would use it for good. Much of the reaction at the time was suspicious, speculating that an LLC was a scheme for Zuckerberg to avoid taxes (which isn’t true) or that it would allow him to spend mountains of money without disclosing how he was doing so (which is).
But the corporate approach actually makes a lot of sense. Under the standard philanthropic model, billionaires set up a foundation and give it a huge endowment. Every year, the foundation has to give away at least 5 percent of its total value. Meanwhile, the other 95 percent gets invested in blue chip stocks, hedge funds, foreign currencies, whatever will keep the total endowment the same size. That’s how foundations like Rockefeller and Ford exist in perpetuity: Do-gooders work on one side of the building finding things to donate to, while bankers work on the other side, making sure there’s more to donate next year.
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“This idea that philanthropy is only about nonprofits is an outdated model,” says Paula Goldman, a vice president at the Omidyar Network. Pierre Omidyar, the founder of eBay, was one of the most prominent tech billionaires to merge his investing and grant-making. The foundation still gives donations, but the LLC provides loans and seed capital and invests in things like solar-powered lighting startups, Brazilian test-prep companies and funds that discover Indian entrepreneurs.
Zuckerberg is going even further, giving up on a foundation entirely and putting all of his charity money in a corporate form with no limits on how to spend it. He’s not interested in making his money back. He just wants the flexibility to fund charities or companies or both. Which explains why one of Zuckerberg’s most recent donations wasn’t a donation at all. It was $10 million in seed capital for an education startup called Bridge International Academies, a chain of private elementary schools that wants to deliver education to the world’s poorest students.
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The primary appeal of Bridge, especially to investors like Zuckerberg, is the $6 per month it says it charges its students. Operating as a business rather than a charity gives each school an incentive to deliver a decent education and ensures that it’s not going to wither away when development agencies or donors move on to the next idea.
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It’s tempting to stop there, to say capitalism perverts philanthropy, full stop, and advise Zuckerberg to just go back and form a foundation. But that’s not right either. One of the most successful private-sector development projects of the last 10 years is M-PESA, the mobile-money system that allows people in Kenya to transfer money via their cell phones. Before the system launched, Kenyans sent money to each other by mail, or by giving envelopes full of cash to bus drivers. Replacing an inefficient, expensive system with a regularized one made everybody better off. That’s not as easy to argue, in the long run, about education.
So, when Zuckerberg hears pitches from companies seeking to solve the world’s problems, he shouldn’t ask them if they have a plan to grow, or an ambition to exist in perpetuity. He should ask himself whether he really wants them to replace the systems that already exist, or simply make them better. Because successful companies don’t just disrupt other companies—they disrupt economies, governments and the people who depend on them. That’s not something that Zuckerberg ever had to worry about, but he has to start.
In 2009, four grad students came up with an audacious idea: Instead of giving poor people the things we think they need—bags of food, stacks of clothing, a pair of goats—what if we gave them enough money to decide for themselves?
They called their charity GiveDirectly, and in 2011 they started doing exactly that. They went to villages in Kenya, found the poorest people living there and transferred $1,000 straight to their cell phones. Later, they came back to ask the villagers what they did with the money. Mostly, it turns out, the villagers spent it on better roofs, better food, paying off debts, starting up businesses. All the stuff the development system used to buy for them—but without any overhead.
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In the end, though, Zuckerberg’s greatest impact might be in the model he sets for other philanthropists. The Giving Pledge, which encourages billionaires to donate the majority of their wealth to charity, has attracted more than 142 commitments totaling more than $400 billion. The Founders Pledge has convinced 151 startup executives—most of them look about 19—to devote a portion of their exits to philanthropy. Charitable giving in the United States has nearly quintupled since 1994, and shows no signs of reverting back to opera houses and Harvard.
Five years ago, Google — one of the most public proselytizers of how studying workers can transform productivity — became focused on building the perfect team. In the last decade, the tech giant has spent untold millions of dollars measuring nearly every aspect of its employees’ lives. Google’s People Operations department has scrutinized everything from how frequently particular people eat together (the most productive employees tend to build larger networks by rotating dining companions) to which traits the best managers share (unsurprisingly, good communication and avoiding micromanaging is critical; more shocking, this was news to many Google managers).
The company’s top executives long believed that building the best teams meant combining the best people. They embraced other bits of conventional wisdom as well, like ‘‘It’s better to put introverts together,’’ said Abeer Dubey, a manager in Google’s People Analytics division, or ‘‘Teams are more effective when everyone is friends away from work.’’ But, Dubey went on, ‘‘it turned out no one had really studied which of those were true.’’
In 2012, the company embarked on an initiative — code-named Project Aristotle — to study hundreds of Google’s teams and figure out why some stumbled while others soared. Dubey, a leader of the project, gathered some of the company’s best statisticians, organizational psychologists, sociologists and engineers. He also needed researchers. Rozovsky, by then, had decided that what she wanted to do with her life was study people’s habits and tendencies. After graduating from Yale, she was hired by Google and was soon assigned to Project Aristotle.
Project Aristotle’s researchers began by reviewing a half-century of academic studies looking at how teams worked. Were the best teams made up of people with similar interests? Or did it matter more whether everyone was motivated by the same kinds of rewards? Based on those studies, the researchers scrutinized the composition of groups inside Google: How often did teammates socialize outside the office? Did they have the same hobbies? Were their educational backgrounds similar? Was it better for all teammates to be outgoing or for all of them to be shy? They drew diagrams showing which teams had overlapping memberships and which groups had exceeded their departments’ goals. They studied how long teams stuck together and if gender balance seemed to have an impact on a team’s success.
No matter how researchers arranged the data, though, it was almost impossible to find patterns — or any evidence that the composition of a team made any difference. ‘‘We looked at 180 teams from all over the company,’’ Dubey said. ‘‘We had lots of data, but there was nothing showing that a mix of specific personality types or skills or backgrounds made any difference. The ‘who’ part of the equation didn’t seem to matter.’’
As they struggled to figure out what made a team successful, Rozovsky and her colleagues kept coming across research by psychologists and sociologists that focused on what are known as ‘‘group norms.’’ Norms are the traditions, behavioral standards and unwritten rules that govern how we function when we gather: One team may come to a consensus that avoiding disagreement is more valuable than debate; another team might develop a culture that encourages vigorous arguments and spurns groupthink. Norms can be unspoken or openly acknowledged, but their influence is often profound. Team members may behave in certain ways as individuals — they may chafe against authority or prefer working independently — but when they gather, the group’s norms typically override individual proclivities and encourage deference to the team.
Project Aristotle’s researchers began searching through the data they had collected, looking for norms. They looked for instances when team members described a particular behavior as an ‘‘unwritten rule’’ or when they explained certain things as part of the ‘‘team’s culture.’’ Some groups said that teammates interrupted one another constantly and that team leaders reinforced that behavior by interrupting others themselves. On other teams, leaders enforced conversational order, and when someone cut off a teammate, group members would politely ask everyone to wait his or her turn. Some teams celebrated birthdays and began each meeting with informal chitchat about weekend plans. Other groups got right to business and discouraged gossip. There were teams that contained outsize personalities who hewed to their group’s sedate norms, and others in which introverts came out of their shells as soon as meetings began.
After looking at over a hundred groups for more than a year, Project Aristotle researchers concluded that understanding and influencing group norms were the keys to improving Google’s teams. But Rozovsky, now a lead researcher, needed to figure out which norms mattered most. Google’s research had identified dozens of behaviors that seemed important, except that sometimes the norms of one effective team contrasted sharply with those of another equally successful group. Was it better to let everyone speak as much as they wanted, or should strong leaders end meandering debates? Was it more effective for people to openly disagree with one another, or should conflicts be played down? The data didn’t offer clear verdicts. In fact, the data sometimes pointed in opposite directions. The only thing worse than not finding a pattern is finding too many of them. Which norms, Rozovsky and her colleagues wondered, were the ones that successful teams shared?
Imagine you have been invited to join one of two groups.
Team A is composed of people who are all exceptionally smart and successful. When you watch a video of this group working, you see professionals who wait until a topic arises in which they are expert, and then they speak at length, explaining what the group ought to do. When someone makes a side comment, the speaker stops, reminds everyone of the agenda and pushes the meeting back on track. This team is efficient. There is no idle chitchat or long debates. The meeting ends as scheduled and disbands so everyone can get back to their desks.
Team B is different. It’s evenly divided between successful executives and middle managers with few professional accomplishments. Teammates jump in and out of discussions. People interject and complete one another’s thoughts. When a team member abruptly changes the topic, the rest of the group follows him off the agenda. At the end of the meeting, the meeting doesn’t actually end: Everyone sits around to gossip and talk about their lives.
Which group would you rather join?
In 2008, a group of psychologists from Carnegie Mellon and M.I.T. began to try to answer a question very much like this one. ‘‘Over the past century, psychologists made considerable progress in defining and systematically measuring intelligence in individuals,’’ the researchers wrote in the journal Science in 2010. ‘‘We have used the statistical approach they developed for individual intelligence to systematically measure the intelligence of groups.’’ Put differently, the researchers wanted to know if there is a collective I. Q. that emerges within a team that is distinct from the smarts of any single member.
To accomplish this, the researchers recruited 699 people, divided them into small groups and gave each a series of assignments that required different kinds of cooperation. One assignment, for instance, asked participants to brainstorm possible uses for a brick. Some teams came up with dozens of clever uses; others kept describing the same ideas in different words. Another had the groups plan a shopping trip and gave each teammate a different list of groceries. The only way to maximize the group’s score was for each person to sacrifice an item they really wanted for something the team needed. Some groups easily divvied up the buying; others couldn’t fill their shopping carts because no one was willing to compromise.
What interested the researchers most, however, was that teams that did well on one assignment usually did well on all the others. Conversely, teams that failed at one thing seemed to fail at everything. The researchers eventually concluded that what distinguished the ‘‘good’’ teams from the dysfunctional groups was how teammates treated one another. The right norms, in other words, could raise a group’s collective intelligence, whereas the wrong norms could hobble a team, even if, individually, all the members were exceptionally bright.
But what was confusing was that not all the good teams appeared to behave in the same ways. ‘‘Some teams had a bunch of smart people who figured out how to break up work evenly,’’ said Anita Woolley, the study’s lead author. ‘‘Other groups had pretty average members, but they came up with ways to take advantage of everyone’s relative strengths. Some groups had one strong leader. Others were more fluid, and everyone took a leadership role.’’
As the researchers studied the groups, however, they noticed two behaviors that all the good teams generally shared. First, on the good teams, members spoke in roughly the same proportion, a phenomenon the researchers referred to as ‘‘equality in distribution of conversational turn-taking.’’ On some teams, everyone spoke during each task; on others, leadership shifted among teammates from assignment to assignment. But in each case, by the end of the day, everyone had spoken roughly the same amount. ‘‘As long as everyone got a chance to talk, the team did well,’’ Woolley said. ‘‘But if only one person or a small group spoke all the time, the collective intelligence declined.’’
Second, the good teams all had high ‘‘average social sensitivity’’ — a fancy way of saying they were skilled at intuiting how others felt based on their tone of voice, their expressions and other nonverbal cues. One of the easiest ways to gauge social sensitivity is to show someone photos of people’s eyes and ask him or her to describe what the people are thinking or feeling — an exam known as the Reading the Mind in the Eyes test. People on the more successful teams in Woolley’s experiment scored above average on the Reading the Mind in the Eyes test. They seemed to know when someone was feeling upset or left out. People on the ineffective teams, in contrast, scored below average. They seemed, as a group, to have less sensitivity toward their colleagues.
In other words, if you are given a choice between the serious-minded Team A or the free-flowing Team B, you should probably opt for Team B. Team A may be filled with smart people, all optimized for peak individual efficiency. But the group’s norms discourage equal speaking; there are few exchanges of the kind of personal information that lets teammates pick up on what people are feeling or leaving unsaid. There’s a good chance the members of Team A will continue to act like individuals once they come together, and there’s little to suggest that, as a group, they will become more collectively intelligent.
In contrast, on Team B, people may speak over one another, go on tangents and socialize instead of remaining focused on the agenda. The team may seem inefficient to a casual observer. But all the team members speak as much as they need to. They are sensitive to one another’s moods and share personal stories and emotions. While Team B might not contain as many individual stars, the sum will be greater than its parts.
Within psychology, researchers sometimes colloquially refer to traits like ‘‘conversational turn-taking’’ and ‘‘average social sensitivity’’ as aspects of what’s known as psychological safety — a group culture that the Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson defines as a ‘‘shared belief held by members of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking.’’ Psychological safety is ‘‘a sense of confidence that the team will not embarrass, reject or punish someone for speaking up,’’ Edmondson wrote in a study published in 1999. ‘‘It describes a team climate characterized by interpersonal trust and mutual respect in which people are comfortable being themselves.’’
When Rozovsky and her Google colleagues encountered the concept of psychological safety in academic papers, it was as if everything suddenly fell into place. One engineer, for instance, had told researchers that his team leader was ‘‘direct and straightforward, which creates a safe space for you to take risks.’’ That team, researchers estimated, was among Google’s accomplished groups. By contrast, another engineer had told the researchers that his ‘‘team leader has poor emotional control.’’ He added: ‘‘He panics over small issues and keeps trying to grab control. I would hate to be driving with him being in the passenger seat, because he would keep trying to grab the steering wheel and crash the car.’’ That team, researchers presumed, did not perform well.
Most of all, employees had talked about how various teams felt. ‘‘And that made a lot of sense to me, maybe because of my experiences at Yale,’’ Rozovsky said. ‘‘I’d been on some teams that left me feeling totally exhausted and others where I got so much energy from the group.’’ Rozovsky’s study group at Yale was draining because the norms — the fights over leadership, the tendency to critique — put her on guard. Whereas the norms of her case-competition team — enthusiasm for one another’s ideas, joking around and having fun — allowed everyone to feel relaxed and energized.
For Project Aristotle, research on psychological safety pointed to particular norms that are vital to success. There were other behaviors that seemed important as well — like making sure teams had clear goals and creating a culture of dependability. But Google’s data indicated that psychological safety, more than anything else, was critical to making a team work.
‘‘We had to get people to establish psychologically safe environments,’’ Rozovsky told me. But it wasn’t clear how to do that. ‘‘People here are really busy,’’ she said. ‘‘We needed clear guidelines.’’
However, establishing psychological safety is, by its very nature, somewhat messy and difficult to implement. You can tell people to take turns during a conversation and to listen to one another more. You can instruct employees to be sensitive to how their colleagues feel and to notice when someone seems upset. But the kinds of people who work at Google are often the ones who became software engineers because they wanted to avoid talking about feelings in the first place.
Rozovsky and her colleagues had figured out which norms were most critical. Now they had to find a way to make communication and empathy — the building blocks of forging real connections — into an algorithm they could easily scale.
In late 2014, Rozovsky and her fellow Project Aristotle number-crunchers began sharing their findings with select groups of Google’s 51,000 employees. By then, they had been collecting surveys, conducting interviews and analyzing statistics for almost three years. They hadn’t yet figured out how to make psychological safety easy, but they hoped that publicizing their research within Google would prompt employees to come up with some ideas of their own.
[…]
Sakaguchi was particularly interested in Project Aristotle because the team he previously oversaw at Google hadn’t jelled particularly well. ‘‘There was one senior engineer who would just talk and talk, and everyone was scared to disagree with him,’’ Sakaguchi said. ‘‘The hardest part was that everyone liked this guy outside the group setting, but whenever they got together as a team, something happened that made the culture go wrong.’’
[…]
When asked to rate whether the role of the team was clearly understood and whether their work had impact, members of the team gave middling to poor scores. These responses troubled Sakaguchi, because he hadn’t picked up on this discontent. He wanted everyone to feel fulfilled by their work. He asked the team to gather, off site, to discuss the survey’s results. He began by asking everyone to share something personal about themselves. He went first.
‘‘I think one of the things most people don’t know about me,’’ he told the group, ‘‘is that I have Stage 4 cancer.’’ In 2001, he said, a doctor discovered a tumor in his kidney. By the time the cancer was detected, it had spread to his spine. For nearly half a decade, it had grown slowly as he underwent treatment while working at Google. Recently, however, doctors had found a new, worrisome spot on a scan of his liver. That was far more serious, he explained.
[…]
After Sakaguchi spoke, another teammate stood and described some health issues of her own. Then another discussed a difficult breakup. Eventually, the team shifted its focus to the survey. They found it easier to speak honestly about the things that had been bothering them, their small frictions and everyday annoyances. They agreed to adopt some new norms: From now on, Sakaguchi would make an extra effort to let the team members know how their work fit into Google’s larger mission; they agreed to try harder to notice when someone on the team was feeling excluded or down.
There was nothing in the survey that instructed Sakaguchi to share his illness with the group. There was nothing in Project Aristotle’s research that said that getting people to open up about their struggles was critical to discussing a group’s norms. But to Sakaguchi, it made sense that psychological safety and emotional conversations were related. The behaviors that create psychological safety — conversational turn-taking and empathy — are part of the same unwritten rules we often turn to, as individuals, when we need to establish a bond. And those human bonds matter as much at work as anywhere else. In fact, they sometimes matter more.
‘‘I think, until the off-site, I had separated things in my head into work life and life life,’’ Laurent told me. ‘‘But the thing is, my work is my life. I spend the majority of my time working. Most of my friends I know through work. If I can’t be open and honest at work, then I’m not really living, am I?’’
What Project Aristotle has taught people within Google is that no one wants to put on a ‘‘work face’’ when they get to the office. No one wants to leave part of their personality and inner life at home. But to be fully present at work, to feel ‘‘psychologically safe,’’ we must know that we can be free enough, sometimes, to share the things that scare us without fear of recriminations. We must be able to talk about what is messy or sad, to have hard conversations with colleagues who are driving us crazy. We can’t be focused just on efficiency. Rather, when we start the morning by collaborating with a team of engineers and then send emails to our marketing colleagues and then jump on a conference call, we want to know that those people really hear us. We want to know that work is more than just labor.
[…]
The paradox, of course, is that Google’s intense data collection and number crunching have led it to the same conclusions that good managers have always known. In the best teams, members listen to one another and show sensitivity to feelings and needs.
[…]
‘‘Just having data that proves to people that these things are worth paying attention to sometimes is the most important step in getting them to actually pay attention,’’ Rozovsky told me. ‘‘Don’t underestimate the power of giving people a common platform and operating language.’’
Mandarins may seem an unlikely candidate for a marquee fruit. The most complex and flavorful of citrus, they are correspondingly difficult to grow, as demanding as wine grapes in their requirements for terroir and horticultural prowess. At their finest, they are juicy, sweet-tart and intensely aromatic, but many store-bought specimens are dry and bland. Shippers and merchants often store them far past their peak, and the seeds in traditional varieties can put off consumers.
To get the best of the mandarin boom, it helps to understand the fruit’s history, varieties and seasons.
Native to China and northeastern India, mandarins are one of five original types of citrus (along with pummelos, citrons, kumquats and papedas) from which all others, like oranges and grapefruit, are derived. Until recently, because most mandarins were relatively small, delicate or full of seeds, they remained less cultivated than other citrus in the United States.
To a greater extent than for other citrus, commercial packing can distort the flavor of many mandarins, including clementines. The washing needed for food safety strips the natural wax off fruits, and to keep them from drying out, packers apply artificial wax. This stops natural respiration, leading to the production of fermented and musty flavors, which are aggravated by prolonged storage and unrefrigerated conditions. The only recourse for shoppers is to taste or at least sniff a sample before buying.
The cutest, most child-friendly mandarin is the Seedless Kishu, an ancient Japanese specialty the size of a golf ball, very easy to peel, super sweet, with welcome acidity.
[Image: Haus-Rucker-Co, Grüne Lunge (Green Lung), Kunsthalle Hamburg (1973); photo by Haus-Rucker Co, courtesy of the Archive Zamp Kelp; via Walker Art Center]. I’ve got a short post up over …
Green Lung pumped artificially conditioned indoor air from within the galleries of Hamburg’s Kunsthalle to members of the public passing, by way of transparent helmets mounted outside; the museum’s internal atmosphere was thus treated as a kind of readymade object, “playing with questions of inside vs. outside, of public vs. private, of enclosure vs. space.”
Put into the context of Haus-Rucker-Co’s general use of inflatables, as well as today’s emerging fresh-air market—with multiple links explaining this in the actual post—I suggest that what was once an almost absurdist art world provocation has, today, in the form of bottled air, become an unexpectedly viable business model.
“He always wanted to do something interesting, often to the annoyance of the record company,” Barnbrook said. “He understood the value of the image on a record cover, when other people had forgotten about it.”
The designer added that Bowie was, more than anyone else, the artist responsible for bringing “art-school thinking into the mainstream.”
[…]
“This was a man who was facing his own mortality,” said Barnbrook. “The Blackstar symbol [★], rather than writing ‘Blackstar’, has as a sort of finality, a darkness, a simplicity, which is a representation of the music.”
“It’s subsided a bit now, but a lot of people said it was a bullshit cover when it came out, that it took five minutes to design,” he added. “But I think there is a misunderstanding about the simplicity.”
The use of abstract shapes was developed from Barnbrook’s previous controversial cover for The Next Day album. The design features a white square covering an old photo of Bowie and was influenced by Constructivist art.
The black star graphic also carries deeper meanings, said Barnbrook.
“The idea of mortality is in there, and of course the idea of a black hole sucking in everything, the Big Bang, the start of the universe, if there is an end of the universe,” Barnbrook said. “These are things that relate to mortality.”
For the vinyl edition, the star is cut out from the black sleeve so the record inside is visible.
“The fact that you can see the record as a physical thing that degrades, it gets scratched as soon as it comes into being, that is a comment on mortality too,” said Barnbrook.
[…]
He would look at the stuff, and talk about what he liked and what he didn’t like, not in a rude way, just clear and explaining his reasons why, he was also fulsome in his praise when he liked something. Sometimes he would throw a spanner in the works and ask me suddenly to do something completely different for the project for an hour. That was quite a refreshing way of working and often produced good results as it meant you put aside all of the responsibilities of the project for a moment and could just play.
He was always really respectful about the people who bought his music, so he wanted them to understand the ideas. There was no point in doing something when it was so obscure that people wouldn’t get the reference; it had to relate absolutely to the music.
He understood the value of the image on a record cover, when other people had forgotten about it. We had a renaissance in the 1970s and 1980s of album covers because the format of vinyl, but then it dropped when CDs were introduce. There are still good record/CD covers around, but a lot of time nowadays the cover just had to be “nice”, it wasn’t a thing that provoked discussion, our covers wanted to have that discussion again. Some people hated them, some people really liked them.
[…]
The Next Day was the most divisive one, because we didn’t do quite what people expected, which was a nice new picture of David Bowie on the front. We decided to play with that idea of image expectation.
Some people thought they’d been cheated because it’s a reprint of an old album cover, which is a bit ridiculous, because the cover was in the concept. I think it just puzzled a lot of people too who just “didn’t get it”, which we thought would happen.
However there were a lot of people who also recognised it was a very brave thing to do, something quite new. I dont think anybody other than Bowie would have taken that risk. He was really interested to see how people were reacting to it.
[…]
I’ve always been influenced by Constructivist art, so there was the influence of Kazimir Malevich and John Baldessari on The Next Day cover – the obliteration but also the spiritual, meaningful context of the abstract shapes. That followed through on ★, definitely.
The main thing of course is put over the emotional feeling of the music, that’s what a good record cover does, it lets you know somehow, somewhere within it, what the music is about, or what you believe the music is about is confirmed in it. And there’s not necessarily any logic to that you just have to get somewhere in that area which you have designed, and hopefully it will work.
[…]
He always wanted to do something interesting, often to the annoyance of the record company. Especially with Next Day, they were quite shocked with the cover, and they were pretty sure that it wasn’t going to work. It actually became a very successful viral campaign.
[…]
After all it’s an album called ★, with a cover that has a ★ on it, which doesn’t sound like a leap of imagination. But there was so many tangents we followed, until we realised that it has to cut through the noise of what is going on in the world. We see so many images every single second when we search the internet; it’s a directness that is needed. The simplicity of the design also left it more open.
It also has to appear in many different kinds of media: on a website, on iTunes, in reviews, and in newspapers. These are all practical considerations for it, and as a designer you would always work within for the parameters you have. For instance, it’s not actually written “Blackstar”, it uses a symbol ★, and that symbol goes through different technologies, so it can be used wherever.
Typewriter faces have become part of the aesthetic of journalism, fundraising, law, academia, and politics; a dressier alternative to handwriting, but still less formal than something set in type, they’re an invaluable tool for designers.
I acutely felt the need for such a typeface, and immediately thought of places I’d want to use it on Discover.typography. And while I liked the idea of creating a new typeface that would have this kind of voice — minus the nostalgic clackety-clack look of an actual typewriter face — I wondered if we could achieve these results without the many compromises required of a fixed-width design. Fixed-width faces force every character into a box of the same size, creating charmingly long serifs on the capital I, but tragic, procrustean disfigurements of wider letters like M and W. So I suggested that we relax the system, to create a font that feels monospaced, but behaves more professionally.
Andy made an equally compelling counterproposal, reminding me that the command-line editor — these days, home to so many people who design things — could really be improved by a fully fixed-width typeface. What if, in addition to shedding the unwanted baggage of the typewriter, we also looked to the programming environment as a place where type could make a difference? Like many screen fonts before it, Operator could pay extra attention to the brackets and braces and punctuation marks more critical in code than in text. But if Operator took the unusual step of looking not only to serifs and sans serifs, but to script typefaces for inspiration, it could do a lot more. It could render the easily-confused I, l, and 1 far less ambiguous. It could help “color” syntax in a way that transcends the actual use of color, ensuring that different parts of a program are easier to identify. Andy hoped this might be useful when a technical pdf found its way to a black-and-white laser printer. It was an especially meaningful gesture to me, as someone who, like three hundred million others, is red-green colorblind.
[…]
In developing Operator, we found ourselves talking about JavaScript and css, looking for vinyl label embossers on eBay, renting a cantankerous old machine from perhaps the last typewriter repair shop in New York, and unearthing a flea market find that amazingly dates to 1893. Above is the four-minute film I made, to record a little of what went into Operator, and introduce the team at H&Co behind it. —JH
The Geneva Freeport, which may be the world’s most valuable storage facility, consists of seven beige warehouses and a large grain silo in La Praille, an industrial zone a short tram ride from the city’s lakeside panorama of banks and expensive hotels. One recent morning, rain was falling on the chain-link fence that runs through the property, and snow was visible on the mountains to the south. Iris scanners, magnetic locks, and a security system known as Cerberus guard the freeport’s storerooms, whose contents are said to be insured for a hundred billion dollars, but the facility retains a blue-collar feel. There were signs to the showers. Men stood around in aprons and smoked. Everything about the place tells you to look the other way.
The freeport began, in 1888, as a group of sheds near the waterfront. It was one of countless similar spaces around the world, where customs authorities allow duties and taxes to be suspended until goods reach their final destination. In time, however, the Geneva Freeport became legendary. It grew very large, and its official status—the freeport is eighty-six per cent owned by the local government—and kinship with the opaque traditions of Swiss banking made it a storage facility for the international élite. Under the freeport’s rules, objects could remain in untaxed limbo, in theory, forever. Treasures came and they did not leave. A generation ago, these goods were cars, wine, and gold. More recently, they have been works of art.
Yves Bouvier was among the first to see the potential of the freeport as an adjunct to the art market. A blond, compact man of fifty-two, Bouvier is the owner of Natural Le Coultre, a moving and storage company and the largest tenant in the complex. For more than a hundred years, the firm shipped everything from citrus fruit to industrial machinery; during the First World War, Natural Le Coultre supplied prisoners of war with Red Cross food parcels. Since 1997, however, when Bouvier took over the firm from his father, it has handled only paintings and sculpture. Bouvier refurbished the company’s premises at the freeport, which include two showrooms, and encouraged a framer to open a workshop in the building. Since 2013, Natural Le Coultre has rented more than twenty thousand square metres in storage space and has had well over a million objects in its care.
Every item passes through a single packing room, where it is unwrapped, photographed, and studied for damage. On the morning I visited, a Bob Dylan painting had arrived, along with a Picasso bronze from Greece. There were hammers hanging in order of size, and a stack of crates containing works by Léon Pourtau, a minor Impressionist. Ramon Casais, who has worked in the freeport for the past thirty years, agreed to show me a corridor of locked storeroom doors only after he had gone ahead to make sure there was absolutely nothing to see.
Specialist logistics companies, like Natural Le Coultre, are the quiet butlers of the art world. They operate deep inside it but are not quite of it. When an artist has made a sculpture out of butter, or scalpels, or half a passenger jet, it is up to a shipper to get it from Hong Kong to Miami in the same condition as when it left, and to make no fuss. To do their work, shippers must know many things. They are given records of private sales and the names of collectors, in order to navigate customs. In the course of a typical day, stopping by the homes of dealers and the back rooms of galleries, they learn who answers the door and the phone number of the assistant, and see the other pictures on the walls. The shippers’ professional indifference means that they are often in the room at moments of extreme commercial sensitivity. “Imagine that I am in Basel and I need to show a client a painting,” Thomas Seydoux, a dealer and a former chairman of Impressionist and modern art at Christie’s, told me. “Ninety-nine per cent of the time, you are going to show it with a transit agent.”
This intimacy means that, once you find your shipper, you tend to stick with him. Relationships last for decades, built on trust and a sense, usually unspoken, of absolute limits. In sixteenth-century Venice, diplomats were instructed to employ illiterate valets, who would be unable to read any secret documents they were asked to carry. A transit agent “should by default be a blind man,” Seydoux told me. “That is the very nature of his job.” Everything works fine, as long as people stay within their allotted roles. Seydoux said, “You can’t win somebody’s trust by saying you are blind and then open your eyes.”
[…]
Bouvier speaks an imperfect, gestural English, but he explained that becoming a shipper allowed him to immerse himself in “the feeling and the difficulty of art.” He had no formal training, just what passed through his hands. “It started with the touch,” he said. “You have all the panoply: small, huge, it’s with value, with no value. You have everything, so you learn.”
Shipping also introduced Bouvier to the complicated lives of the rich—their taxes and their divorces—and the other ancillary trades that help the art world go around: restorers, framers, hired experts, operators of tiny galleries in Paris clinging on from sale to sale. He realized they all had needs of their own.
[…]
Bouvier financed purchases that dealers couldn’t afford on their own. He sorted out cash flow and bills. He became adept at setting up offshore companies—Diva, Blancaflor, Eagle Overseas—to enable galleries to buy specific works and mask the identity of other investors in a transaction.
[…]
“When you buy, it is always to sell,” he said. “You always have the buyer before you have the seller.” On August 16, 2000, he bought a Paul Gauguin landscape, “Paysage aux Trois Arbres,” from Peintures Hermès, a Swiss gallery associated with the Wildenstein family of art dealers, for $9.5 million. Two weeks later, he sold the picture to Mandarin Trading, a Bahamas-based art fund, for $11.3 million, making a profit of sixteen per cent. Mandarin Trading later sued the Wildensteins for fraud, alleging that it was the victim of a scam to inflate the value of the painting. The case was dismissed in 2011. I once asked Bouvier what drew him to particular propositions. “In the mountains, it was the same,” he replied. “I go in the place which is the most complicated, the most risky place.”
[…]
Building a collection involves a thousand small, complex tasks: storage, shipping, condition reports, restoration, making copies, framing, due diligence, insurance. For these services, Bouvier would charge an extra two per cent of the purchase price of any painting he sold them.
[…]
Major buyers typically build collections through several dealers and auction houses, knowing that they will be charged the maximum the market can bear. To protect their interests, many also employ an art adviser or consultant, who works for them and is paid a retainer or a commission—in the region of five per cent—on the works that they acquire. Very rarely are all these roles performed by one person.
[…]
The relationship between art dealer and collector is particular and charged. The dealer is mentor and salesman. He informs his client’s desires while subjecting himself to them at the same time. The collector has money, but he is also vulnerable. Relationships start, prosper, and fail for any number of reasons. It is not always obvious where power lies. Over time, each one can convince himself that he has created the other.
[…]
Access to the oligarch was strictly controlled. “Besides his lawyer and his hairdresser, I don’t think he sees normal people at all,” Rappo once told me.
[…]
Hidden behind company names and, often, dealers working on his behalf, he tended to disguise his role in transactions. “To be invisible is the best way to make business,” he said.
[…]
The income from his dealing enabled Bouvier to expand his storage facilities. For several years, he had been looking to build a freeport outside Europe similar to the one in Geneva. In 2005, he settled on Singapore. In 2008, Bouvier decided to base himself in the country as well. The Singapore Freeport, which required new legislation to be passed by the national parliament, opened in 2010. Bouvier put Tony Reynard, his childhood friend, in charge. The freeport, which abuts the city’s international airport, is an over-engineered hybrid of vault and temple. It cost Bouvier a hundred million dollars to build. At first, no bank would finance it. “They thought we were loonies,” Reynard said.
A freeport offers few tax advantages and scarcely any security features that a standard bonded warehouse cannot provide. But Bouvier’s development in Singapore carried within it two ideas. The first is that freeports will become hubs in the sixty-billion-dollar international art market, destinations in themselves—places for scholars, restorers, insurers, art-finance specialists, consultants, and dealers. The second idea is that the ultra-rich don’t want just another warehouse. “If you buy a painting for a hundred million, what do you want? You want to feel well,” Bouvier said. “Why else do people travel in first class?”
In Singapore, Bouvier specified each component, from the fire-resistant walls, coiled through with steel, to the height of the doors: three metres, to admit the largest contemporary installations. “I chose everything,” he said. “The door handles. I’m obsessive about that.” He used a lighting artist named Johanna Grawunder, whose work he collects, and commissioned an enormous sculpture, “La Cage sans Frontières,” by the Israeli artist and designer Ron Arad, to stand in the atrium.
The opening of the Singapore Freeport, and its immediate success—Christie’s took a space—brought Bouvier international attention. The facilities tapped into a fascination with the tastes and financial shenanigans of the one per cent. Bouvier opened a second, slightly smaller freeport in Luxembourg, in September, 2014, and The Economist noted his role in the development of “Über warehouses for the ultra-rich.” He made plans to replicate the model in Dubai and to act as a consultant for a vast new project in Beijing.
[…]
He bought a Gauguin that had not been sold since the Second World War and a lost Leonardo da Vinci, “Salvator Mundi,” that had been sensationally rediscovered. On its display at the National Gallery in London, the da Vinci became one of the most talked-about pictures in the world. According to Rappo, Rybolovlev wanted it for the wall of his study. Bouvier brought the painting to the Russian’s apartment in New York, where, Rybolovlev told me, he experienced a profound emotional reaction—“a vibration”—in its presence. He bought the picture for $127.5 million.
[…]
ery transaction at the top end of the private art market involves a chain, a cast of characters that stretches from the buyer to the seller: finders, agents, lawyers, lenders. It is rare for the principals to know everyone involved, and it can be improper to ask. Bouvier was a master at making chains—short, long, simple, or twisted, depending on the deal. If he knew that a seller would prefer an approach from an auction house, he would send someone, usually from Sotheby’s. Otherwise, Bouvier would send an intermediary. Often this was a Corsican named Jean-Marc Peretti, who was investigated for running an illegal gambling circle in Paris in 2009. Bouvier is attracted to outsiders in the art world. “The best people are just good businesspeople—they are butchers,” he said.
[…]
Bouvier told me that such blurring of who exactly owns what, and when a transaction occurred, is commonplace in the art market. When you walk into a gallery, you never know what the dealer is selling on consignment, what he owns outright, or how prices have been arrived at. “It is not lying,” he said. “There is always a part of the story which is true.” But Bouvier was ruthless in exploiting what was left unsaid. “Joueur de Flûte et Femme Nue,” which Bouvier sold to Rybolovlev for twenty-five million euros, he had bought the day before for just three and a half million. He made a sixty-million-dollar profit on the Klimt.
[…]
In the early nineteen-fifties, Rothko began experimenting with powdered pigments, solvents, and egg to lend extra force to the colors in his canvases. He wanted viewers of his pictures to feel as if they were inside them. When Bouvier drew back the curtains, the painting seemed to explode in front of his eyes.
[…]
Around this time, I spent a day at the Luxembourg Freeport. The building is made of sixty-five hundred tons of concrete. Heavy doors are locked with six-digit codes.
[…]
As he spoke, Bouvier kept four Nokias and a BlackBerry within reach at all times. When one of them rang, he would turn it over, to see which realm of his dealings the inquiry was coming from. He reminded me, in a not entirely unlikable way, of an animal busy in carrion, like a jackal.
The new identity comes ten years after Channel 4’s last brand refresh, but while ten years is a long time in media, the broadcaster’s previous look – which included abstract idents where the 4 logo appeared out of landscapes – hadn’t necessarily grown tired and was still much loved by viewers. With this in mind, Chris Bovill and John Allison, head of the channel’s in-house creative agency 4Creative (which is behind the concept for the new identity, alongside creative agency DBLG), describe the challenge of rebranding as “one of the biggest, scariest briefs we’ve ever had”.
Wisely then, when there is so much love for Channel 4’s iconic style, the team decided to keep the classic 4 logo originally designed by Lambie Nairn, though it will no longer appear in its full form on TV. Instead the 4 has been broken down into its constituent parts, which will be used across all of Channel 4’s branding, from on-screen graphics menus, to the new typeface, to the channel’s idents.
“Our starting point was that Channel 4 is so much more than just a number,” says Bovill. “We’ve actually got something to say, we’ve got a remit – to be original, alternative, innovative, to be surprising, to be bold. We stand for this – let’s make the branding reflect that. So instead of just telling people what they’re watching, tell them why they’re watching.
“We went back to the start, we went back to the iconic Lambie-Nairn 4 … and we broke it apart. It was incredibly liberating.”
The new identity needs to work hard for the channel, to be distinctive yet flexible enough to work across all Channel 4’s offerings, from Countdown to Channel 4 News (which will feature a new title sequence based around the blocks, launching tonight). “The broadcast media landscape is a much more complicated place than it was ten years ago,” says Allison, “so there’s a need to stand out more than ever before.
“From the very start, we wanted whatever we did to be real and to be tactile, because if you look at a lot of other branding out there, it’s very shiny and CGI-led. As a channel and a brand, we have a real impact on the world around us, and so we wanted our brand identity to be very real and tactile. The blocks run through all the on-screen identity and into the idents that Jonathan Glazer’s filmed for us.”
Glazer’s idents present the blocks as elemental forms born of nature and found within the earth. His films have a sci-fi, slightly mad feel, depicting the blocks being discovered and their impact on the world. While there is a narrative running through the four films, they are abstract enough to potentially leave viewers, especially those more used to the obvious approach of most TV channel branding, scratching their heads and wondering what on earth is going on. Their subtlety is their charm though, and the decision not to spell everything out is a bold and exciting one, plus intentionally leaves room for the channel to expand on the theme in future films.
“Channel 4 is unique and precious, there’s nothing else quite like it, so the idents have a pressure on them to imbue the blocks with that quality, that they are part of the fabric of everything,” says Allison.
The concept behind the channel’s use of type in the new identity is a little more straightforward, though the blocks remain central to this too. Designed by Neville Brody, there are now two fonts, Chadwick and Horseferry, named after the streets that Channel 4 sits on. Chadwick serves as an information font, while Horseferry is the headline font. “Horseferry is built out of Chadwick and in it you can find all the little blocks. They’re all buried within it,” says Alice Tonge, creative director at 4Creative.
“It’s got loads of character – it’s occasionally spiky, sometimes smooth, sometimes goes against the grain, doesn’t always follow type rules. Full of personality, and only something that Channel 4 could own. That was the big thing – to create something that when you look at it, you know it’s Channel 4.”
The new font will be used on air and across all of the channel’s off-air advertising, where it will appear alongside the new, slimmer 4 logo. “Off air is the only place you’ll see the fully formed 4,” says Tonge. “It’s really different from the current 3D graphic – it’s going back to the original 3D tactile blocks. It’s been on a bit of a diet – adding a bit more space around the blocks draws your attention to the blocks themselves.”
Channel 4’s new identity is unusual, but also coherent and confident. While quirky, it avoids falling into being gimmicky, and it’s easy to imagine the fun the team can have with it going forward. It may be coincidental – the rebrand has been worked on for three years – but its arrival at a time of speculation around whether the channel will be privatised seems apt, for it serves as a reminder of the bold, creative decisions that run through the channel’s history, and, according to Allison, remain central to the organisation today.
“There’s an incredible creative culture here, running right through the building,” he says. “So instantly you’re on the front foot because you’re not thinking ‘oh god, how am going to get this thing through’. You know that it will be received in the most nurturing of environments, even if it’s not right. So that gives you so much confidence at the blank piece of paper stage.
“It’s been an incredible honour to work on such a loved brand, a brand very close to our hearts. Hopefully we haven’t let the viewers down.”
In the first Star Wars, when people watched the X-wing flying down the trench, did audiences think that was really happening? Did they believe it was a real X-wing flying? A model of an X-wing flying? What was their understanding of how real that was? Was it more real because the model was part of our world? Is that what people mean by real, a tactile thing? These are philosophical questions that you have to consider when you’re doing a visual effects movie.
[…]
I wasn’t interested in making a retro movie. That was not what I thought we should be doing and it would have had a limited shelf life. When you think of those movies, people were excited to see them, to go along for a great ride with amazing characters. Part of that world achieved a certain charm and authenticity because the filmmakers built sets and went to real locations. That part is fantastic. We wanted to hold onto the charm the original stories had but use the technology available now in a way that would make a more contemporary film.
How do you get the audience invested in the characters and willing to go along for the ride? Part of their brain says this is not a familiar world and what they’re seeing is slightly odd. How do you get past that? You want to convince the audience everything is happening for real by hopefully creating a world that’s a natural extension of the real physical world. My theory is that this is a bizarre extension of primitive storytelling. Think of how invested children become in simple puppetry. This is a crazy extension of that. The whole thing is a trick of some kind.
Clearly you were successful in making the digital effects believable. How did you achieve that?
Part of it was trying to photograph as much in camera as possible to help the actors understand the world they’re immersed in and as a better foundation for our work. We went to places and tried to photograph as much as we could. We tried to make each moment as real as possible and blend the line between real and imaginary as much as we could.
[…]
f you’re tasked to do something that by its nature undermines the concept, it’s hard to pull off. There’s a certain point, if you overexpose your hand … a film like this is so ambitious, so fantastical that no one could imagine it could have happened. The nature of filmmaking in a real space is that you see the place. You react to it. You design shots around that place. If you remove the idea that you’re really there, it becomes a different thing. We tried to show a real level of restraint to keep it in the charming category without losing a level of excitement, without ever being ludicrous.
[…]
In old-fashioned filmmaking, you didn’t go to Tunisia and then change it. You’d go there and that was in the movie. Sometimes, on other films, we might go to a location and then the director would want another version — taller buildings, a different sidewalk. They want their desert a different color. They don’t embrace what they have. This is the VFX era. Every blockbuster has big visual effects. People shoot and figure it out later. Maybe that’s why so many people shoot on green screen. We didn’t want to do that. We had a director who clearly wanted to go to the desert, and he was happy with the desert he went to.
[…]
When you have a ship that travels 600 to 700 miles per hour, it’s difficult to shoot plates, especially with the shot choreography we wanted, unless maybe you hire a jet fighter. So, in the Falcon chase, pretty much everything is digital. We could have just based it on the location and made up the rest, but we would have been in a place of guesswork. So we shot a lot of reference footage from a helicopter. It wasn’t directly usable, but it was incredible reference. You’d notice things about the way the desert behaved — dust coming off surfaces as we travelled. More importantly, the quality of the light on the sand, the geography of the environment. We ended up with 18 hours of aerial footage alone from one camera, and terabytes of photographs. We could see the nuances of colors of the sand dunes from photography based on the time of day and conditions.
The other thing we did was to survey the crap out of everything and everywhere we went. We researched and recorded environments as accurately as we could. We had a whole team on this. We had size and scale. We had stereographic views. This isn’t outside the bounds of what people do for visual effects movies, but we really wanted to be accurate.
When you see the little speeder moving across the landscape, it’s a completely digital shot. But because we’d been there, when we recreated that moment, we did it from a physically-based approach. I don’t know if J.J. [Abrams] knows how we constructed the images, but he was at the location and he knew how it looked.
The other thing is that we photographed these events in a way that I think did not cross the line of the impossible with complicated camera moves. We made sure if you had a Millennium Falcon, this is how you’d shoot it. We tried to photograph some kind of version of all these events to give us a point of reference even if we threw it away. One advantage I had in putting shots together in the final movie is that I shot second unit. If a shot involved visual effects, I knew what we’d need to achieve.
[…]
And our modelers had so much affection for these ships. Dave Fogler [asset build supervisor], who came to ILM from the model shop, was interested in rebuilding the Falcon in the way it should be built, with integrity and a referential quality. He had an inherent knowledge of the processes the model shop guys used. It was a very loving process in many respects.
[…]
Probably about a third of the time BB8 is digital. This is a perfect example of riffing off something that exists. It’s another version of my desert analogy. If you don’t build BB8, where does the personality come from? The personality came from being there with the actors and J.J. directing BB8 just like another actor. When we created the CG character, we had absolute reference. Each animator had a template. People could comment about the droid’s performance just like they would with an actor because his personality was defined.
[…]
We did motion capture tests at Andy Serkis’s [Imaginarium in London], and then did motion capture on set. Ben Morris, who set up the ILM studio in London, was on set for the shoot, and Mike Mulholland supervised the London work. I’ve always believed that if you cast the right person, the rest takes care of itself. You have to believe in the actor; motion capture won’t save a bad performance. Maybe it might, but chances are it won’t. Casting is what it’s all about.
Andy’s character didn’t move around very much, but we needed a great face performance. We shot Andy and then re-mocapped his scenes once we got the edit. We went back and refined the shots in his studio. He can play anything — small, large, in-between. Lupita is way more restrained. She does a softer, nuanced kind of performance. For her, we used image-based capture and some keyframe work. Andy’s studio helped us out with that, but it was really about the face, and we used systems from Disney research. The face of the character she plays is very different, so we had to make sure that translation was successful. But again, like with BB8, she defined the character, the nuanced performance.
[…]
I think I’ve learned that maybe showing restraint is something we should do more of in the future. Restraint sounds negative, and that’s not the connotation I mean. Just trying to make sure the shots are focused. More isn’t necessarily better.
It’s interesting how much the work has advanced, even in the last couple of years, and certainly from Episodes III to VII. It’s a completely different lay of the land, and the people are capable of so much more. You don’t want to do things you’ve done before. You want to do something more challenging and exciting in different ways. Sometimes, by defining what the box is, you can have a more interesting problem to solve.
“Can I see some hands raised? Who in the audience think of Frank Gehry’s Jay Pritzker Pavilion in Millennium Park as contextual?” (No hands raised.) “Who think of it as not?” (No hands raised.) “Since apparently none of you know, let me tell you!”
What follows is a lengthy exposé about what, according to the person asking the question, is a highly contextual piece of architecture. Speaking is Jeffrey Kipnis, theorist, designer, filmmaker, curator, educator, founding director of the Architectural Association’s Graduate Design Program and professor at Knowlton School of Architecture, Ohio State University.
The exchange (if one can call it that) takes place during one of the parallel sessions at the biennial. Apart from Kipnis, the session includes Patrik Schumacher, design director at Zaha Hadid Architects; Peter Eisenman, principal of Eisenman Architects and a pivotal figure in American academia (present and past positions too many to list); Theodore Spyropoulos, founder of architecture studio Minimaforms; and me, a partner at the Office for Metropolitan Architecture. The panel has been assembled to express its views on a potential agenda for 21st-century architecture.
The composition of the panel seems odd: most of the panelists’ formative lives have been lived in the 20th century, and all the panelists are from a part of the world to which – unless all current indicators are completely misgiven – the 21st century will not belong.
The venue is The Gold Room in the Congress Plaza Hotel. Tickets have sold at $50 and, while that ticket price suggests the event is in high demand, the room is only half full, making its grandeur perfectly inappropriate for the occasion. One of African architecture’s rising stars speaking at a venue next door appears to have drawn a larger crowd. Still, the modest turnout hardly fazes the panelists. The epicenter of American academia thrives even in the absence of an audience.
Schumacher’s opening salvo is a proclamation of the end of pluralism (delivered with an impeccable German accent) and of the imminent global dominance of a single remaining master-style – his own. Eisenman, who is next, suggests a change of format: “Only Patrik should present, while the rest of us put up a collective resistance.” His request is denied and Eisenman has to content himself with “agreeing to disagree”. His presentation calls for “heroes instead of stars in architecture”. Not something anyone could agree to disagree with, although Spyropoulos tries. But here, in the context of an all-male, all-white stage, his call leaves a somewhat dubious taste.
After Eisenman, it is open season, not just for each of the panelists’ individual obsessions (in order of appearance: parametricism, Alberti, Gehry, Piketty and robots), but also for the audience. Someone, who introduces himself as humble teacher at a humble university, asks why there are no women on the stage. With almost Trumpian bravado, Kipnis replies that he LOVES women, but is dumbfounded by the stupidity of such a question, which he then views as a logical explanation for the career progress (or lack thereof) of the questioner. In an attempt to rescue the situation, Eisenman murmurs that women have become so popular these days that they have become unaffordable. We simply have to assume he means as panelists.
It is Kipnis’ turn. His idea of offering the audience value for money is to subject it to a kind of intellectual waterboarding. His positions are invariably introduced via the same discursive formula: “Did you know…? You did not…? You should! Since you don’t, let me tell you…” It is unclear to what extent – if at all – he is seeking a discussion. Kipnis tempts the audience with long pauses, invariably followed by “let me finish!” when someone interjects.
The main topic of his presentation is the Guggenheim Helsinki museum competition, a competition that to this day has not produced a realised building and doesn’t look like it’s going to any time soon.
He presents the many entries to the competition as a repository of contemporary design intelligence, showing a meticulously categorised inventory of apparently simultaneously emerging families of design solutions to particular problems. Akin to the prolific genres in contemporary music, certain “design waves” are identified and tagged with a name. Any link to the individual authors is discarded. Trends take priority over signatures. Originality is no longer a paradigmatic feature. The myth of individual genius is dismantled in favor of architects as a virtual, yet largely unaware collective.
His argument takes a bizarre turn when he digresses into a strange and unexpected endorsement of Frank Gehry, who in many ways personifies the exact opposite. Unlike the struggling souls of the Helsinki competition, Gehry is the ultimate signature architect. His approach to architecture is his and his alone, it permits no following other than through imitation. In bringing up Gehry, Kipnis turns his own suggestion of architecture as a form of collective progress into scorched earth even before it has landed.
Kipnis seems blissfully unaware of the contradiction. He proceeds to explain Gehry’s design intentions as if he were the oracle of Zeus. The silence that ensues at his question about the contextual nature of the Pritzker Pavilion is not so much a sign of the audience’s ignorance as it is of its bewilderment. Don’t all Gehry’s buildings look the same?
It is clear to everyone in the room (at least to those who have built a building) that whatever the magnitude of the intentions that go into a design, it must ultimately subside to the prevailing perception – however unfair – of its physical presence, at which point the only correct answer to Kipnis’ question is that it is irrelevant. If legacy is ultimately a question of numbers, what constitutes the more significant intellectual fact: one person’s supposed insight into Frank Gehry’s design intentions, or the vast majority’s willful ignorance of them? Who holds the key, Kipnis or the Simpsons?
As the evening progresses, the event turns into a painful X-ray of the current state of American academia: a strangely insular world with its own autonomous codes, dominated by some antiquated pecking order with an estranged value system and no hope of a correction from within. The often grandiose character of the debate stands in stark contrast to the marginal nature of that which is being debated.
The western architectural ivory tower has become a theatre of the absurd, blind to its decline into irrelevance. Self-referencing and obsessed by minutiae unrelated to the built environment, our academics need to break out of their closed information loop and get back into the real world.
Kipnis’ definition of context doesn’t go beyond the immediate physical surroundings of the architectural object. Any notion that architecture might be shaped by a larger political, societal or economic context does not seem to register on his radar. It is as though America’s architectural establishment is preoccupied with studying footnotes under a microscope hoping they will turn into a novel.
Those who attend the dinner afterwards are cautious with their alcohol intake. Even with the debate officially concluded, one has to remain alert. Dinners serve as extra time for the settling of undecided intellectual battles – a last chance to turn defeat into victory. When all other subjects appear to have been exhausted, for some unidentifiable reason the table conversation turns to the brain and the question whether it ought to be discussed as an organ or as a muscle.
Just when the vision of a brain without a skull is about to make me lose my appetite, Kipnis turns to a young woman at the table. He asks her to guess his favorite organ. When she looks at him in shock – she must be less than half his age – he smiles: “Rest assured, my favorite organ is my mouth.” Eisenman points out that the mouth is in fact not an organ. For the first time that evening, Kipnis looks genuinely unsettled, prompting Eisenman to ask the question of the day: “Jeff, have you been drinking?”
The art boom has led to good times for institutions known as “free ports”: bonded warehouses in which all sorts of commodities, from grain, to gold, to fine art, can be stored, and remain, while they are in storage, exempt from tax and customs duties.
The Geneva free port is, from the exterior, a rather unimpressive warehouse in an industrial area of the city.
Inside, it is said to house the largest collection of fine art anywhere in the world, although it is hard to find out exactly what is in there, as both the port’s management and local customs officials refuse to divulge any information.
[…]
“I was led to a storage place where paintings were stored,” he explained, “and I had to go through Picasso works, so I was brought down in the morning and they locked me into the safe.
“At lunchtime I had to ring for them to take me out of the vaults. It was quite a strange environment because I was alone and I was surrounded by so many valuable artworks.”
It is estimated there are at least 300 works by Picasso alone stored at the free port, many belonging to the reclusive Nahmad family, who have been buying and trading art as an investment for half a century.
[…]
One Nahmad family member has been quoted as saying that “Monet and Picasso are like Microsoft or Coca Cola”, meaning that they are likely to be safe investments for a long time to come.
[…]
“We see art actually as a very good investment,” he said. “It’s a great way to diversify your portfolio, a good hedge against inflation. There are many reasons to consider art now as an investment.”
[…]
Still, the current boom in art means free ports are booming too. Geneva is building a 10,000 sq m (108,000 sq ft) extension, due to open next year, and new free ports are springing up in Luxembourg, and in Singapore.
But, said Jean-Rene Saillard, Geneva remains the oldest, the biggest, and the one with the most art.
“It would be probably the best museum in the world if it was a museum,” he added.
The Body Shop: Arch Enemy The Body Shop: Arch Enemy 5 simple stretches and strengthening exercises that can cure a nagging foot injury. Foot Work: Strengthen Your Feet and Ankles
Plantar fasciitis is a runner’s recurring nightmare. It’s a notoriously stubborn injury that strikes when the thick band of fibers that runs along the bottom of the foot becomes inflamed. It can start as a minor irritation but can advance and develop into a sidelining injury, especially if it’s not treated promptly or properly. While ice, rest, orthotics, and pain relievers may ease the discomfort, the injury can come back again (and again) unless you address the underlying cause—weakness and tightness in the muscles and tendons that make up and support the foot, says Irene Davis, Ph.D., P.T., director of the Spaulding National Running Center, Harvard Medical School in Cambridge, Massachusetts. If arch pain is your nemesis, Davis recommends doing the following exercises barefoot daily.
Calf Raises
Strengthens the tendons in your heels and calf muscles, which support your arch.
To Do: Raise up on the balls of your feet as high as possible. Slowly lower down. Do three sets of 10 reps. Progress to doing the raises on stairs (with heels hanging off), and then to single-leg raises.
Step Stretch
Improves flexibility in your Achilles tendon and calf—when these areas become tight, the arch gets painfully overloaded.
To Do: Stand at the edge of a step, toes on step, heels hanging off. Lower your heels down, past the step, then raise back up to the start position. Do three sets of 10 reps.
Doming
Works the arch muscles and the tibialis posterior (in the calf and foot) to control excess pronation.
To Do: While standing, press your toes downward into the ground while keeping the heel planted, so that your foot forms an arch (or dome). Release, and do three sets of 10 reps on each foot.
Toe Spread and Squeeze
Targets the interossei muscles of the foot, which support the arch.
To Do: While sitting, loop a small resistance band around your toes. Spread toes; release. Then place a toe separator (used at nail salons) in between toes. Squeeze toes in; release. Do three sets of 10 reps of each exercise on both feet.
Towel Curls
Works the toe-flexor muscles that run along your arch to increase overall foot strength.
To Do: Lay a small hand towel on the floor, and place one foot on the towel. Using just your toes, scrunch the towel toward you, hold, then slowly push the towel away from you back to start position. Do three sets of 10 reps on each foot.
Memoire is a typeface that degrades with every use.
MYYCp 