March 28, 2011

Architect From Portugal Wins Pritzker By KATE TAYLOR

Eduardo Souto de Moura, a Portuguese architect whose work combines the abstract minimalism of Mies van der Rohe with a preference for local materials and building techniques, has been awarded the 2011 Pritzker Prize, architecture’s highest honor.
Mr. Souto de Moura, 58, who lives and works in Porto, a northern city, is the second Portuguese architect to win the prize. The first, in 1992, was his mentor, Alvaro Siza.
The choice, announced on Monday, casts a spotlight on an architect deeply respected by his colleagues but not widely known by the public outside of Portugal, where he has done most of his work.
“You could say he’s an architect’s architect,” said Karen Stein, a writer and design consultant who is on the jury for the Pritzker. She added: “His architecture requires careful looking. It’s I guess what’s referred to as ‘slow architecture.’ You really have to take the time to look at all the parts and pieces.”
Mr. Souto de Moura, who was traveling and not available to be interviewed, was born and educated in Porto, Portugal’s second-largest city. He studied sculpture before switching to architecture and working, from 1975 to 1979, for Mr. Siza, who encouraged him to start his own firm. The two men remain very close; their offices are in the same building, and they have collaborated on several projects.
Among Mr. Souto de Moura’s major works is a soccer stadium set into a mountain in Braga, Portugal, which was completed in 2004. It is in a former granite quarry, and more granite was blasted away and crushed to make concrete for the structure. The stadium has two long sides, with the jagged face of the mountain forming a third side and the fourth open to a view of the city.
Ms. Stein described the stadium as “muscular and monumental” but said it also conveyed a feeling of intimacy.
Kenneth B. Frampton, a professor of architectural history at Columbia University, said that Mr. Souto de Moura’s early private residences, built in the 1980s, combine a Miesian use of steel structure and large expanses of glass with the kind of masonry walls typical of the region around Porto. Mr. Frampton said that he once commented to Mr. Souto de Moura on his use of masonry.
“He said, ‘I think I’ve used the last generation of craftsmen who know how to make walls like this,’ ” Mr. Frampton recalled.
In recent years Mr. Souto de Moura has designed a museum in Cascais, Portugal, dedicated to the work of the Portuguese artist Paula Rego, which is composed of a set of geometric volumes in red concrete, and an office complex in Porto that combines a vertical tower and a low, horizontal building. Mr. Frampton said that the complex, with its rhythm of solids and voids, “overcomes the almost fatal banality of high-rise office buildings.”
The Pritzker Prize, created in 1979 by Jay A. and Cindy Pritzker, is awarded annually to a living architect who is deemed to have made “significant contributions to humanity and the built environment through the art of architecture.” In the past the award, which comes with $100,000, has gone to internationally famous architects like Norman Foster, Rem Koolhaas and Zaha Hadid.
Mr. Frampton, who has criticized much celebrated late-20th-century architecture as being overly spectacular, was surprised but delighted to hear that Mr. Souto de Moura had won.
“It would be hard to think of an architecture further removed from Thom Mayne,” he said, referring to the 2005 Pritzker Prize winner, who is known for bold theatrical designs, like that of his 2009 academic building at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art.
“Souto de Moura’s work is sort of more grounded in a way,” Mr. Frampton said. His buildings “have very strong presence as works, but they haven’t been thought out as images from the beginning,” he added. “They have their character coming from the way in which they have been developed as structures.”        

Tools for ThinkingBy DAVID BROOKS

March 28, 2011


Tools for ThinkingBy DAVID BROOKS

A few months ago, Steven Pinker of Harvard asked a smart question: What scientific concept would improve everybody’s cognitive toolkit?



The good folks at Edge.org organized a symposium, and 164 thinkers contributed suggestions. John McWhorter, a linguist at Columbia University, wrote that people should be more aware of path dependence. This refers to the notion that often “something that seems normal or inevitable today began with a choice that made sense at a particular time in the past, but survived despite the eclipse of the justification for that choice.”



For instance, typewriters used to jam if people typed too fast, so the manufacturers designed a keyboard that would slow typists. We no longer have typewriters, but we are stuck with the letter arrangements of the qwerty keyboard.



Path dependence explains many linguistic patterns and mental categories, McWhorter continues. Many people worry about the way e-mail seems to degrade writing skills. But there is nothing about e-mail that forbids people from using the literary style of 19th-century letter writers. In the 1960s, language became less formal, and now anybody who uses the old manner is regarded as an eccentric.



Evgeny Morozov, the author of “The Net Delusion,” nominated the Einstellung Effect, the idea that we often try to solve problems by using solutions that worked in the past instead of looking at each situation on its own terms. This effect is especially powerful in foreign affairs, where each new conflict is viewed through the prism of Vietnam or Munich or the cold war or Iraq.



Daniel Kahneman of Princeton University writes about the Focusing Illusion, which holds that “nothing in life is as important as you think it is while you are thinking about it.” He continues: “Education is an important determinant of income — one of the most important — but it is less important than most people think. If everyone had the same education, the inequality of income would be reduced by less than 10 percent. When you focus on education you neglect the myriad of other factors that determine income. The differences of income among people who have the same education are huge.”



Joshua Greene, a philosopher and neuroscientist at Harvard University, has a brilliant entry on Supervenience. Imagine a picture on a computer screen of a dog sitting in a rowboat. It can be described as a picture of a dog, but at a different level it can be described as an arrangement of pixels and colors. The relationship between the two levels is asymmetric. The same image can be displayed at different sizes with different pixels. The high-level properties (dogness) supervene the low-level properties (pixels).



Supervenience, Greene continues, helps explain things like the relationship between science and the humanities. Humanists fear that scientists are taking over their territory and trying to explain everything. But new discoveries about the brain don’t explain Macbeth. The products of the mind supervene the mechanisms of the brain. The humanities can be informed by the cognitive sciences even as they supervene them.



If I were presumptuous enough to nominate a few entries, I’d suggest the Fundamental Attribution Error: Don’t try to explain by character traits behavior that is better explained by context.



I’d also nominate the distinction between emotion and arousal. There’s a general assumption that emotional people are always flying off the handle. That’s not true. We would also say that Emily Dickinson was emotionally astute. As far as I know, she did not go around screaming all the time. It would be useful if we could distinguish between the emotionality of Dickinson and the arousal of the talk-show jock.



Public life would be vastly improved if people relied more on the concept of emergence. Many contributors to the Edge symposium hit on this point.



We often try to understand problems by taking apart and studying their constituent parts. But emergent problems can’t be understood this way. Emergent systems are ones in which many different elements interact. The pattern of interaction then produces a new element that is greater than the sum of the parts, which then exercises a top-down influence on the constituent elements.



Culture is an emergent system. A group of people establishes a pattern of interaction. And once that culture exists, it influences how the individuals in it behave. An economy is an emergent system. So is political polarization, rising health care costs and a bad marriage.



Emergent systems are bottom-up and top-down simultaneously. They have to be studied differently, as wholes and as nested networks of relationships. We still try to address problems like poverty and Islamic extremism by trying to tease out individual causes. We might make more headway if we thought emergently.



We’d certainly be better off if everyone sampled the fabulous Edge symposium, which, like the best in science, is modest and daring all at once. 

'The Book of Mormon' Missionary Men With Confidence in Sunshine By BEN BRANTLEY

March 24, 2011


Theater Review
'The Book of Mormon'  Missionary Men With Confidence in Sunshine By BEN BRANTLEY

This is to all the doubters and deniers out there, the ones who say that heaven on Broadway does not exist, that it’s only some myth our ancestors dreamed up. I am here to report that a newborn, old-fashioned, pleasure-giving musical has arrived at the Eugene O’Neill Theater, the kind our grandparents told us left them walking on air if not on water. So hie thee hence, nonbelievers (and believers too), to “The Book of Mormon,” and feast upon its sweetness.



Now you should probably know that this collaboration between the creators of television’s “South Park” (Trey Parker and Matt Stone) and the composer of “Avenue Q” (Robert Lopez) is also blasphemous, scurrilous and more foul-mouthed than David Mamet on a blue streak. But trust me when I tell you that its heart is as pure as that of a Rodgers and Hammerstein show.



That’s right, the same Rodgers and Hammerstein who wrote the beloved “Sound of Music” and “King and I,” two works specifically (and deliciously) referenced here. Like those wholesome, tuneful shows, “The Book of Mormon” is about naïve but plucky educators set down in an unfamiliar world, who find their feet, affirm their values and learn as much as they teach.



Of course different times call for different contexts. So instead of sending a widowed British governess to a royal court in 19th-century Siam or a nun in training to an Austrian chateau, “The Book of Mormon” transports two dewy missionaries from Salt Lake City to 21st-century Uganda.



And rather than dealing with tyrannical, charismatic men with way too many children, our heroes (enjoyably embodied by Josh Gad and Andrew Rannells) must confront a one-eyed, genocidal warlord with an unprintable name. And a defeated, defensive group of villagers, riddled with AIDS, who have a few choice words for the God who let them wind up this way. And local folks like the guy who keeps announcing that he has maggots in his scrotum. That’s enough to test the faith of even the most optimistic gospel spreaders (not to mention songwriters).



Yet in setting these dark elements to sunny melodies, “The Book of Mormon” achieves something like a miracle. It both makes fun of and ardently embraces the all-American art form of the inspirational book musical. No Broadway show has so successfully had it both ways since Mel Brooks adapted his film “The Producers” for the stage a decade ago. Directed by Casey Nicholaw and Mr. Parker, with choreography by Mr. Nicholaw, “The Book of Mormon” has its tasty cake (from an old family recipe) and eats it with sardonic relish.



If you know “South Park,” the 14-year-old animated sitcom about four naturally impious young lads, then you will know that Mr. Parker and Mr. Stone take a schoolboy’s delight in throwing spitballs at things sacred, including most major religions. But you also may have gathered that these men take equal pleasure in the transcendent, cathartic goofiness of song-and-dance numbers. (As students they collaborated on the low-budget film “Cannibal! The Musical,” and their 1999 feature-length film, “South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut,” is one of the best movie musicals of recent years.)



As the composer of “Avenue Q” — which took public-television-style teaching songs out of the kindergarten and put them into post-collegiate urban life — Mr. Lopez helped bring to Broadway young adults who had grown up on “Sesame Street.” And Mr. Nicholaw has demonstrated an affinity for savvy, high-energy musical pastiche with his work on shows like “Spamalot” and “The Drowsy Chaperone.”



Now, as a team, Messrs. Stone, Parker, Lopez and Nicholaw have created the ideal production for both the post-“Avenue Q” kids — the ones who wallow in the show tunes of “Glee” without shame and appear on YouTube lip-syncing to cast albums — and their older, less hip relatives. “The Book of Mormon” is utterly fluent in the language of musical entertainment from vaudeville to anthem-laden poperettas like “Les Misérables” and beyond. And it uses this vocabulary with a mixture of reverence and ridicule in which, I would say, reverence has the upper hand.



Which brings us, inevitably, to the issue of sacrilege. This show makes specific use of the teachings of the Mormon Church and especially of the ecclesiastical history from which the play takes its title. Church founders like Joseph Smith and Brigham Young appear in illustrative sequences, as does Jesus and an angel named Moroni. When delivered in musical-comedy style, these vignettes float into the high altitudes of absurdity.



But a major point of “The Book of Mormon” is that when looked at from a certain angle, all the forms of mythology and ritual that allow us to walk through the shadows of daily life and death are, on some level, absurd; that’s what makes them so valiant and glorious. And by the way, that includes the religion of the musical, which lends ecstatic shape and symmetry to a world that often feels overwhelmingly formless.



All the folks involved in “Mormon” prove themselves worthy, dues-paying members of the church of Broadway. Whether evoking Salt Lake City-style spic-and-span-ness or squalid poverty in a drought-plagued village, Scott Pask’s sets and Ann Roth’s costumes have exactly the right heightened brightness, which stops short of the cartoonish. And as sung and danced, the production numbers have the pep and shimmer of yesteryear’s showstoppers.



Set to eminently hummable melodies, Mr. Nicholaw’s superb choreography (his best to date) manages to evoke the tap orgies of Busby Berkeley, the zoological pageantry of “The Lion King,” the calisthenic boogieing of latter-day Broadway and even Martha Graham-style Americana. These numbers are witty, ridiculous, impeccably executed, genuinely stirring and — contrary to expectation — free of snark or satirical malice.



Nearly all of them are surprising, and I don’t want to give away much. But allow me to single out my personal favorites. “Turn It Off” is a hilarious chorus-line piece about repression, performed by the (all-male Mormon) missionaries and destined to make a star of its lead singer and dancer, Rory O’Malley (whose character is repressed in his own special way). And then — oh, bliss — there’s “Joseph Smith American Moses,” a spirited, innocently obscenity-laden reworking of Jerome Robbins’s “Small House of Uncle Thomas” sequence from “The King and I.”



The book is not quite on the level of the production numbers. (Isn’t that always the way with musicals?) The fractious bromance between Elder Price (Mr. Rannells), a human Ken doll, and Elder Cunningham (Mr. Gad), a portly, hysteria-prone slob, will seem standard issue to anyone who has attended buddy comedy flicks since, oh, the 1980s. Mr. Gad’s character, in the mold of Jack Black and Zach Galifianakis, is a variation on a screen type you can’t get away from these days.



But Mr. Gad remains likable and funny (especially doing Bono in a number called “I Am Africa”), while Mr. Rannells makes brilliant use of his character’s narcissism, which isn’t so far from the impulse that animates musical stage stars. As Nabulungi, the smart, dewy village girl who dreams of Salt Lake City, the sweet but savvy Nikki M. James gives a lovely, funny performance, never winking at her character’s earnestness. And for combining polish, enthusiasm and individuality, the ensemble is the best in a musical since Susan Stroman’s team for “The Producers.”



In a number that perfectly captures the essence of this happily paradoxical show, Mr. Rannells’s character beards the den of the evil warlord (Brian Tyree Henry) and, much like Julie Andrews in “The Sound of Music,” sings radiantly of his faith and hope and determination. The warlord isn’t buying any of it, and the priceless contrast between attitudes here is the difference between the world of musicals and the world of real life.



“The Book of Mormon” thoroughly understands this difference. This makes all the sweeter its celebration of the privilege, for just a couple of hours, of living inside that improbable paradise called a musical comedy.

My Dog Days Are Over By DOREE SHAFRIR

March 23, 2011, 9:30 pm


My Dog Days Are Over By DOREE SHAFRIR



Townies is a series about life in New York.



Tags:

death, Dogs, New York City, Pets





I was in a rush that morning and so our walk was shorter than usual. As I brought Lee back inside our building and fed her and put water in her bowl and put her pills between two slices of salami, I told myself that her dog walker was coming in the afternoon and, in any case, the day before we had gone to Fort Greene Park and I had let her off her leash and she had scampered around.



It was the beginning of November and when I got home that night, it was dark and getting cold and I was tired, and I had to take Lee out for another walk. She ran up to me and barked as I came through the door, but then, when I went to get her leash, all of a sudden she couldn’t get up at all.



•



Lee was everyone’s favorite dog in part because she didn’t make it easy for you to like her. She was stubborn and needy and scared of almost everything: kids, loud noises, basketballs and footballs, dancing — any sudden movement, really — and cats. She wouldn’t fetch. She barked, loudly, when people were having sex. When friends came over she would insist on being petted and if they stopped she would nudge them with her head, sometimes so hard that people who were holding glasses of wine spilled it on themselves.



But she was also silly and loyal and had a perfect round tan spot on her white back, and she wiggled her behind when she walked, and when you let her off the leash in the park she would bound toward the dogs who still hadn’t been neutered and flirt shamelessly with them, even if they were a fraction of her size. When she finally trusted people she would let them play with her and rub her tummy. She once stole a carrot cake off the back of a kitchen counter and ate the whole thing.



Ping Zhu

In the eight years I had her, Lee was my only constant: I lived in seven apartments in two cities; I am on my fourth job, not counting internships and freelance work; I went to two graduate programs, one of which I finished, one of which I didn’t; I dated a bunch of guys, some for a while; I made and lost friends. And knowing I had to take care of her meant I couldn’t do certain things that people do in their 20s, like take spontaneous trips or stay out until dawn.



Even though I knew on a rational level that she wouldn’t always be there, I sort of assumed that she would be. I couldn’t picture a world of mine in which she wasn’t.



•



The first thing I did when it seemed like Lee couldn’t get up was try to make her get up. Maybe, I thought, she just needed a little help. She was almost 14, after all, and she had had arthritis for the last three years. Lately her feet had been dragging on her walks, and sometimes she would collapse on the sidewalk, or fall as she went up or down the four steps leading into our building. But she had always managed to make it back up, and so I assumed this time would be no different: I put her collar and leash on and tried lifting her hind legs while simultaneously pulling up her front half with her leash. She just stared at me. She didn’t seem aware that her back half wasn’t working.



Related Anna Holmes: We Were Kittens Once, and Young

I grew up, but my cats, my steadfast companions, got old.





I didn’t know what to do, so I called Sam. We had broken up over the summer — I’d moved out of the Carroll Gardens apartment we shared and back to Fort Greene — and we were friendly, but distant. He hadn’t seen Lee since the breakup, but a few weeks before I had run into him at a party and promised him that if it looked like things were getting bad he could see her one last time. I wasn’t sure if things were in fact getting that bad but I knew I wanted him there.



I got his voicemail. I left a message asking him to please call me. I called my friend Emily, who lives nearby and had dogsat for Lee many times. She seemed to know right away that something was wrong; I rarely talk on the phone, to anyone, and it was 11 on a Thursday night. “Lee can’t get up,” I blurted, and then I realized I was crying. “I don’t know what to do. She can’t get up,” I repeated.



“Oh no,” Emily said.



“I don’t know what to do,” I said. “I don’t know what to do.”



Emily said she’d be right over. Then Sam called back. He was at a work party in Manhattan. He asked if I wanted him to come over. I said no. Then I said yes, and so by 11:30 the three of us were sitting in my living room. Lee didn’t seem particularly perturbed; she was happy to see two of her favorite people, and she was still able to drag herself backward around the apartment. I gave her some food and she ate it quickly, and she drank some water. “See? Maybe she’s O.K.,” I said. Sam and Emily looked at each other, then at me.



I learned that night that there is a pet ambulance service, and it is based in Astoria, Queens, and when you call them they ask what kind of animal you have and how much it weighs and what the problem is and where you want to take it, and 45 minutes or so later a burly man shows up with a bag and a muzzle and carries your pet downstairs, and you sit in a van with the back seats taken out and the driver tells you that it is illegal, in New York State, for an ambulance that does not transport humans to have a siren but that the police are usually lenient if he is forced to run a red light.



It was close to 2 a.m. when the veterinarian at the 24-hour clinic offered a prognosis. She was reasonably sure that Lee had had a spinal stroke. X-rays, she said, would at least rule out cancer; if I wanted a more definitive diagnosis, she’d have to get an M.R.I., and even then it wasn’t guaranteed they’d know exactly what was wrong. In the meantime, they were going to keep her in the hospital for two days.



When I went to pick her up that Saturday, she seemed disoriented, but happy to see me. The vet tech had to show me how to use the sling that would hold up her back half, which was basically paralyzed, and hold the leash at the same time, which was tiring and awkward; then she gave me a bag of medication and told me that I was to lie her down on her side and rotate each hind leg, backward and forward, for 20 minutes three times a day. If she was going to get better, the vet said, I would see progress in a few days.



•



Watching a dog age comes with its own set of daily, incremental choices and changes. Her tan spots have mostly faded; she is grizzled and gray, and her eyes have the same film over them that I remember seeing in my great-grandmother’s eyes when I was a child. One day she can get up on the bed; the next day she falls, whimpering, when she tries to leap onto it, and no amount of coaxing can get her to try again. One day she stops barking when I turn the key in the lock and that is when I realize she’s losing her hearing, and at the park, when I’m not directly in front of her, she seems panicked and lost and I know she can’t see as well as she used to. She can’t make it up three, then two, then one flight of stairs.



Lee getting old reminds me of my own mortality; in her I see what it is to become elderly, to not be able to do the things you used to be able to do, to have things happen slowly, seemingly forever, and then very and irrevocably quickly. And for this I am irrationally and deeply jealous of people whose dogs die suddenly and young, because although they feel a different kind of pain, this is something they never have to face.



•



The night I decided to put Lee down, I sat alone in my apartment at my computer for hours, mindlessly listening to music and reading Twitter and Tumblr, and sobbing, those deep kinds of sobs where you can’t breathe and you can’t control the tears, which just keep coming, even when you think you don’t have any left. It seemed unjust and yet fair that she had no idea what was to happen the next day, and every time I thought about that I cried more.



Lee almost never slept in my bedroom — she would usually either sleep in the living room or in the bathroom — and especially since she stopped being able to walk, getting around the apartment meant she had to drag herself. But when I woke up in the morning she was lying on the floor next to my bed.



That afternoon, when it actually came time to go, it was almost impossible to be somber because nearly everything seemed to be going comically wrong: She peed in the hallway as Sam and I, grim-faced, were trying to get her outside, and so he took her downstairs and put her in the car while I cleaned up. In the car she couldn’t get comfortable, and struggled to sit up, then lie down, then sit up again. And then we parked too far away from her vet and so we had to hustle her down Atlantic Avenue, Sam hoisting her up by the sling and me leading her with the leash.



We finally got to the vet and they led us to a cozy room that felt like a therapist’s office. Sam and I sat down on the couch while Lee lay on the floor on a blanket. Her butt was stained with urine and I noticed how red the joints on her front legs were, from where she had been licking them. We were alone in the room. We looked at each other. “What happens now?” I said. Sam shrugged. “No idea,” he said. Lee was quiet.



Her vet came in and knelt down on the floor next to her. “So what’s going to happen is a technician is going to come in and give her an injection that will make her go unconscious,” she said. “That will take a few minutes. Once we’re sure she’s unconscious, I’ll come in.”



“So you’ll actually … do it?” I said.



She nodded. “So I’m going to leave the room now — the tech should be in soon,” she said. “But we can do this as quickly or as slowly as you want.” I nodded.



I just remember certain images from the next 20 minutes: the bandage with stars on it that the vet tech put on her leg after he injected her, me caressing her head and stroking her side. The way her tongue hung out of her mouth and stuck, immobile, to the floor as she drifted off to sleep but how one ear stayed up, and how I thought that maybe this meant she was still awake and there was still time to save her. The way her vet said simply, “She’s gone.”



•



All this winter, when I looked outside I thought of her bounding through the snow, flakes on the end of her snout, so excited just to burrow back and forth through the drifts.



Doree Shafrir has contributed to New York Magazine, The New Yorker, The Awl and The New York Observer, where she was a reporter. She is a senior editor at RollingStone.com.

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