This post originally appeared at EcoSalon.
 

Big city, smaller footprint:
blurring the line between landscape design and modern architecture.  

The trend of vertical gardening is up, as is the rise of the jolly green skyscraper. Easy on the eyes and easier on the planet, upward greenery is transforming our concrete jungles into ivied oases.

The Musee du Quai Branly in Paris (top) is one such example, with some 8,600 vertical square footage dedicated to more than 170 different species of plants.

London’s Athenaeum, its tendrils and blossoms looming high over Piccadilly Circus, is another.  

To read the rest of this article, visit EcoSalon. 

El Velador
Directed by Natalia Almada
POV, premieres Sept. 27 on PBS

Death carries with it a heavy responsibility. That’s one profound lesson we can glean from Natalia Almada’s POV documentary El Velador, which chronicles a side of the Mexican drug war many viewers are not accustomed to seeing. In Culiacán, death has become an industry, a way of life, a way of surviving. The documentary follows a young woman sweeping a family member’s mausoleum, cemetery workers constructing gravesites for another 300 expected customers, and a lone cemetery night watchman who protects the sprawling memorials. The people in Almada’s film each have a daily connection with the dead.

There is no physical violence in El Velador, but it is a strikingly violent film. In one scene, a young girl buys a piece of fruit from a vendor as a woman (just off camera) wails loudly during a funeral. In another, explosions ignite the starlit sky just behind the night watchman, who is so unfazed he doesn’t bother turning around. We’re left wondering whether the thunderous flashes were fireworks or gunfire, but it seems for the watchman, neither would be particularly remarkable. The violence of El Velador lies in these contrasts, where the effects of brutality and absence are powerfully present in mourners, families, and communities.

Almada has written that the mausoleums and memorials in her film function in the community as “a grand expression of remembrance, a refusal to be invisible, anonymous and forgotten.” This is certainly true for the small army of mourners, cemetery workers, and watchmen that maintain and protect that memory. But at the same time, Almada has hidden that memory from her viewers. El Velador is itself deeply anonymous, with no named characters, no conventional narrative, and only a couple of hints at the story’s geographic landscape.

Most of us understand the drug war through the mechanical details of news media—who, what, where, when—along with value judgments and prescriptions for change. El Velador obscures all of these, in favor of a unique intimacy that can only be produced through familiarity, repetition, and deceptive silence. What the film conveys most forcefully are these heartbreaking details, how a culture of violence has seeped into ordinary life in what seems like every possible way.
 

This article originally appeared at Chronicle.com.  

In a world filled with images of Jesus, this one made headlines. He stood in a stained-glass window wearing a simple white robe and a dark tunic. When sunlight struck the glass just so, kindness radiated from his white face and warmth from his brown eyes. This was a comforting Jesus, and for decades he had been with this black congregation in Birmingham, Ala. But on Sunday morning, September 15, 1963, less than three weeks after Martin Luther King Jr. proclaimed his dream of racial equality, dynamite set by white supremacists exploded outside the 16th Street Baptist Church, and four little girls who had gone to the basement lounge to freshen up were dead. The face of Jesus shattered into a thousand shards of glass. In the blink of an eye, the prince of peace was a casualty of racism.

The bombing would become a pivotal moment in the civil-rights movement of the 1960s. The outrage that grew around the nation helped spur the voting-rights campaign and pave the way for passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. By 2004, two days after winning the Democratic nomination for a U.S. Senate seat, Barack Obama flew to Birmingham to give a speech at the city's Civil Rights Institute. He took the opportunity to cross the street and visit the church, by then a national historic landmark. When he entered, he observed a "still-visible scar" along the wall where the bomb had gone off. He saw portraits of the four young girls and thought about his two little daughters at home. He sat to pray, and above him in stained glass was the Jesus installed in 1965 to commemorate the bombing. This one seems sad, his arms stretched out, crucified. His hair is short, cropped; his face black.

The same year the church's black Jesus was dedicated, Mormon leaders in Salt Lake City resurrected an image of Jesus to present themselves to the nation and the world. The Christus, as the statue is known, was created in the early 19th century by a Dutch artist, but Latter-day Saints made it their own when they placed a replica in a Visitors Center in Temple Square. Jesus stands more than 11 feet high. He is made of all-white marble, and his hair flows below his shoulders. His right arm and pectoral muscle are exposed to reveal his chiseled physique. He could just as easily adorn the cover of a best seller as a Bible storybook.

If these two Christ icons could stand side-by-side, their differences could not be more startling. One is huge and authoritative; the other reserved and contemplative. One showcases power, the other suffering.

Together, they illustrate how the image of Jesus has played a vital role in American debates about race, political power, and social justice. The story of the color of Christ is the story of a Jesus made white, challenged by rival figures contending with white supremacy—like the black Jesus now looking down from the window of the 16th Street Baptist Church—and re-formed in a different color.

As recent presidential elections remind us, it is also a story still unfolding.

Almost 50 years after the bombing in Birmingham and the installation of the Christus in Salt Lake City, today's campaign features candidates as different as the two Christ figures. The biracial child of an African immigrant and a Midwestern white woman squares off against the son of a powerful American midcentury politician.

Less remarked are the differences in how the color of Christ pertains to each candidate's campaign. Ever since videos emerged in 2008 of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright shouting "God damn America" and "Jesus was a poor black man," Obama has been attacked for the words of his Chicago pastor. The Jesus of Wright's black-liberation theology is too incendiary for many voters, black and white. (Surveys show that very few African-American churchgoers think of Jesus as black, and that many whites are affronted by the idea.) At the same time, Obama has been presented in rhetoric and imagery as a Christ-like figure who can redeem the nation and world (sometimes portrayed with a crown of thorns, sometimes riding on a donkey). This black savior is a fellow sufferer.

By contrast, Romney, whose religion is so very much a part of his life, has experienced few questions about the many whitened images of Jesus in Mormon art. Although European and American artists have commonly depicted Jesus as white, Mormons were among the first Americans to give him blue eyes, and their theology has a particular focus on the body—they believe that Jesus still has the same physical body he had 2,000 years ago. Even though the Christus was first placed in Salt Lake City just a few years before Romney entered Brigham Young University, there has been no public debate over the race of the candidate's Christ. Of course, no one has compared Romney to Jesus, either.

As is often true, both the rhetoric and the silence speak volumes. Time and again throughout American history, what has been said about the color of Christ (and what has been left unsaid and displayed through art) highlights some of the most profound struggles within the nation.

Read the rest at Chronicle.com. 

Image by Mark Gstohl, licensed under Creative Commons.  

The Hagia Sophia in Istanbul was one of the most influential and architecturally significant houses of worship in the medieval world. Built by Byzantine Emperor Justinian in the sixth century, the building has been a religious and political flashpoint ever since, starting as a Christian church, becoming a Muslim mosque, and now existing as a secular museum.

With its contentious past in mind, it’s no surprise that the current custodians have banned worship in the building; most unfortunately, the form of worship it was designed to amplify: singing. But those walls can talk and technology has given us a way to listen, as Cynthia Haven reports in Stanford (September/October 2012).

Since 1934, the building has tantalized lovers of ancient music, like Stanford art history assistant professor Bissera Pentcheva, who have longed to hear what it sounded like to sing in the sacred space. “For a building that had such an important aura or presence, to lose its voice is really dramatic,” said Pentcheva. Fortunately, she didn’t need to look too far to find two people who could give Hagia Sophia its voice again.

At Stanford’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics, Pentcheva met consulting professor Jonathan Abel, who had previously worked with doctoral student Miriam Kolar on recreating the aural experience of a ceremonial Incan structure with the hope of gaining a better understanding of the sociology of the ancient worshipers. Abel’s expertise includes analyzing, synthesizing and manipulating sound, so the duo was the dream team Pentcheva needed to answer her pressing question. 

The trick for Kolar and Abel was to devise a way to record and synthesize the acoustic signatures of Hagia Sophia without actually having to sing in the building. The solution couldn’t have been simpler: “Balloon pops are convenient for probing the acoustics of a space, as they generate relatively uniform radiation patterns and consistent ‘N-wave’ waveforms,” said Abel. In other words, the balloon pop mimics the way a human voice would bounce off the magnificent 182-foot-high dome and 40 arched windows.

Back in the lab, Abel pinpointed the acoustic fingerprint of the balloon pop and designed a computer model that can apply that fingerprint to any piece of music, effectively making it sonically identical to what it would have sounded like in the actual building. Abel then recorded 13 members of the Portland, Oregon-based vocal group Cappella Romana, and placed each voice into the acoustic recreation of Hagia Sophia. The result was surprising to everyone. “The building is super-reflective of acoustic energy,” said Abel. “Sound is smeared out, each note bleeding into the next, rendering speech less intelligible.” Where reverberation in modern acoustic spaces is usually around two seconds, reverb in the Hagia Sophia is a whopping 11 seconds. This suggests that singing and speaking in the space was probably much slower than anyone has ever considered, likely giving an audience plenty of time to absorb the spiritual message.

Cappella Romana’s virtual performance in Hagia Sophia will be presented in a custom-built space on the Stanford campus next February. And as far as Abel is concerned, the four-year project has given him much more than a quick listen to the past. “The space is telling you all these things about it as you’re listening,” said Abel. “It gave me an awareness of what architecture can do for humans.”

Read the entire article at Stanford , a publication of the Stanford Alumni Association.

Image courtesy of MiGowa, licensed under Creative Commons.