Raw Material
The New York design firm LOT-EK caught Boston’s attention with its design for the temporary Puma City on Fan Pier, using shipping containers. When you mine the industrial landscape, the possibilities are endless.
Jeff Stein: When people are immersed in a new culture, they seem to react in one of two ways. Sometimes they bring their former lives, customs, and attitudes with them and try to impose them upon the new environment. But sometimes they revel in the new, taking advantage of their previous experience to see things in a fresh way, to see the opportunities. You and your partner Giuseppe Lignano fall into the second group. You came to the US from Italy, where you both studied architecture at the University of Naples in the 1980s. How would you describe your academic experience before coming here?
Ada Tolla: We were immersed in postmodernism, but it was an informed postmodernism. The postmodern movement in Italy was very different than in other parts of the world, especially in America, in the sense that it was never playful. It was really serious about the past. Being raised in Naples, we were heavily surrounded by history. In the end, we left the past and traveled to the present — we came to America. We discovered that there actually was a present, and one could do something in the present.
Studying in a place like Italy, you really learn about the history of architecture and come to appreciate the layering of history. You become very respectful. Coming to the US was like opening a door into another time. It’s not that we didn’t know it — this was before the Web, but of course there was television. But our understanding of America was very filtered — it was never a direct experience. So looking at a completely different reality was very empowering. And the experience of looking at it with fresh eyes was very important.
Jeff Stein: What you’ve been able to do is discover some things that are invisible to those of us who haven’t had the really visceral historic experience that you have had. You make them visible.
Ada Tolla: The artist Ellen Wexler put it in slightly different terms. She said that because we are blind to the content of what these things represent, we are able to see them in a more abstract way.
Jeff Stein: My office, on the sixth floor of the Boston Architectural College, looks out over mostly four-story 19th-century brick buildings in Boston’s Back Bay. From that perspective, the main feature of these historic buildings is all the machines that are attached to them to make them useful and livable — elevator penthouses, air-conditioning units, cooling towers, fire escapes. We try to overlook that stuff — by pretending it’s not there, it isn’t there. You bring it back into our consciousness.
Ada Tolla: Designers tend to think those machines and devices disrupt and destroy what they think of as architecture: the main volume. Instead, from the beginning, we felt a positive energy in the way in which this country just does things: In order to provide the comfort, the safety, the efficiency, the things that we need as human beings living in this kind of environment, you just go ahead and do it. You add air conditioning. You put a fire escape in front of building façades. You run an elevated highway through a city right in front of buildings. You make these really powerful gestures and interact in a very interesting way with what we, more conventionally, consider as architecture. Giuseppe and I immediately sensed those gestures as something very positive, not negative, and something that had a lot of potential, exactly because it is uncontrolled and not “designed.”
As we were trying to understand our interest in that phenomenon, we talked about the idea of artificial nature, the idea that there is an aspect of architecture that is a layer within our built environment that develops on its own, that is not controlled by anybody, that just grows. It’s similar to the way nature behaves. Stuff pops up and appears — tanks, air conditioning, billboards — and all these other layers that belong to our civilization just grow and infest and interact with architecture as we traditionally think of it. In reality, they are a huge part of our visual culture and our urban culture.
Jeff Stein: I want to ask about the name of your firm, LOT-EK [pronounced “low tech”]. In the William Gibson short story, “Johnny Mnemonic,” Johnny visits the Lo Teks, an urban tribe living in the ruins of the San Francisco/Oakland Bay Bridge. Here’s a quotation from the book: As Johnny is “…led up into refuge in their future primitive aerie of repurposed industrial detritus, the copious graffiti on the weathered domes below actually fades until only a single name appears: LO TEK in dripping black capitals. ‘Who’s Lotek?’ he asks. ‘Not us, boss,’ they say.”
This is interesting to me for two reasons. One is for the science fiction reference in the name of your firm, a post-apocalyptic science fiction at that. The other is because your work does in fact take an attitude toward technology: it re-purposes some actual high-technology objects — welded metal boxes, the basis of world trade — by just stacking them up. Doing so makes us confront our attitudes about what, a generation ago, we imagined to be high-tech stuff in architectural culture.
Ada Tolla: The surprising thing is that we hadn’t even read Gibson. The name emerged at the end of the ’80s, when the word “high-tech” had become ever-present in our discourse and culture. But our focus wasn’t ever just on the low-tech; it was really on both Low and Tech and the way those two things interacted. Our interest is in the man-made and in the byproducts of our civilization and our own present. It’s a way to engage with what we are right now as a culture in a positive critical way, not just in terms of the negative environmental consequences of the Industrial Revolution.
Most of the raw materials that we end up using are already highly processed when they come to us; even natural materials — wood, for instance — comes to us as four-by-eights, two-by-fours. By the time you get it, it’s already a man-made product. Ada Tolla
Jeff Stein: Your firm is well known for your reuse of industrial products. It’s not the same as recycling. You’re not moralistic; instead, you take a celebratory attitude. Recycling has to do with converting waste into reusable materials or returning a material to a previous stage in a cyclic process, but that’s not exactly what happens when you reuse things.
Ada Tolla: For us, the most important aspect of reuse is the creative one. In that sense, we both belong and don’t belong in the category of what is called sustainable practice. Recycling is not our first mission.
Jeff Stein: It’s just an unintended consequence?
Ada Tolla: Exactly. From the very beginning, our main interest, as young architects practicing within an extremely urban environment, was the question, What are our raw materials? Most of the raw materials that we end up using are already highly processed when they come to us; even natural materials — wood, for instance — comes to us as four-by-eights, two-by-fours. By the time you get it, it’s already a man-made product.
So the question became, Can we draw these raw materials out of what is already around us? Our first two larger-scale projects used trucks; we’re in the meat-packing district in New York, so we’re surrounded by these trucks that deliver meat and that’s what we see out our windows. In a way, it overlaps with some of the logic of sustainable practice, where everything is about “local.” New Jersey’s been a great source for us. Thank God that we’ve got industrial New Jersey, otherwise we would be out of business!
We immediately became interested in the chemical reaction that is generated when you bring together a program — which is a great thing about architecture, because you have this given purpose that you have to deal with and that offers a good amount of resistance — and an object. There’s a clash, and then you have to see what gives and what doesn’t. It’s an amazing process because what happens is less about form-making, less about starting from a blank sheet and drawing a beautiful picture, and more about establishing a dialogue and seeing how unexpected solutions emerge.
Jeff Stein: One aspect of your work that distinguishes you from some sustainable practices is that you immediately see the architectural potential of these objects.
Ada Tolla: That simple, even banal, object on the street has interesting architectural potential the moment it contains a space, or as soon as it can be seen as modular or stackable or transformable. When we import these objects into other environments, they bring all their previous connotations, but they also become something else within the project. And these objects are ubiquitous in man-made America. Along with being this culture of people who pollute the planet, we are also an incredible culture of makers. We are very productive and there’s a lot of ingenuity in that production.
Jeff Stein: You and Giuseppe are certainly part of the culture of makers. Your output since forming a firm almost 20 years ago is amazing, not just in terms of buildings that we can visit, but also in the number of temporary installations in galleries, public places, museums — places where the public can have a whole-body experience of your work.
Ada Tolla: When we started, we were very focused on becoming a “real” architecture practice, although we started in a very unusual way, by making things. Parenthetically, I must tell you that in architecture school, we never built one physical model, ever.
Jeff Stein: So you must have been longing to do this sort of thing.
Ada Tolla: Yes. Giuseppe always said that, from childhood on, he was somebody who would undo things to understand how they were put together. I, on the other hand, was brought up as a girl; I don’t think I ever even held a screwdriver. But the idea of actually trying to make things allowed us to engage with what we were doing. The first projects have a lot of detail because they were made with our own hands. Then there came a moment when we realized that we didn’t have the expertise anymore, and that, in order to learn, we had to start working with other people.
This unconventional start was more typical of an artist trajectory than an architect trajectory. We never worked for an architecture office here in the States. We already had the idea of LOT-EK. We knew what we wanted to do. So we made our money at night doing other things, and in the daytime we were here in our office experimenting with the idea of making things. We started to get some interesting commissions — a lot of work came from the art world in the beginning; it was much more responsive to us than the architecture world. The architecture world didn’t really know our place. We weren’t really an architecture office, you know? We were saying that we were, but we weren’t. But we loved the fact that the span of our projects was very broad and of a very different scale, and the temporality allowed us to play with things that we were interested in, that couldn’t necessarily be played with within the confines of conventional building design.
Jeff Stein: There’s a sense that your work isn’t pretty, but that there is a beauty to it.
Ada Tolla: It’s interesting that you bring up the issue of beauty, because that’s something that has come up a lot.
Jeff Stein: I’m sure, because you use found objects that we not only tend to overlook in the landscape, but also actually try to overlook, because as they’re used in their first life, they aren’t understood to be beautiful. But when you pluck them out of their context, all of a sudden we can see some of that beauty.
Ada Tolla: We truly love the objects that we work with. We love how fantastic they are, how well they were conceived. We are not just reusing the object, but also reusing all the human intelligence that went into developing them.
Jeff Stein: The artificial intelligence pioneer Marvin Minsky once said to me, “You’re an architect, maybe you can tell me — all children learn to make buildings with building blocks. So, what happened? Why is it that we don’t do this as adults? Why don’t we build buildings with building blocks?” In one sense, you actually do build buildings with building blocks — how else to describe your work with shipping containers? Architecture is about transformation, and that’s what you do: you transform found objects.
That simple, even banal, object on the street has interesting architectural potential the moment it contains a space, or as soon as it can be seen as modular or stackable or transformable. Ada Tolla
Ada Tolla: Seeing a container depot for the first time was a mystical experience. And it was completely accidental. It was in the early ’90s, when we used to say, OK, let’s drive around New Jersey to see what we can use. It was a Sunday, so no one was working, and we stumbled across this shipping container depot. Beautiful winter day, blue sky. We still have the photos, not digital at that time. I remember at one point I actually said, “I haven’t been so excited about being in a built environment in a long time.”
When we talk about shipping containers now, we show those pictures to communicate the experience. Because there in the depot, you can see the avenue, the piazza, the little street, the façade — all the components of the urban built environment as we think of it. And we felt that potential immediately. This is not just a block, it’s something that can take on a different scale.
Jeff Stein: There’s also the potential in their sheer quantity. There are several million containers sitting around in ports all over the world. Does anyone come to you with commissions for shipping container reuse?
Ada Tolla: Yes. We started with this excitement about the box and what it can do. We first applied the concept to a competition for the Gorée Memorial Museum in Dakar, where we used hundreds of containers. That was the first shipping container project, and it demonstrated the potential of these boxes at a large architectural scale, beyond the beauty of the object itself. From that moment on, we embraced a huge learning curve, understanding the container, how it works, how it’s made, how it operates, how you can transform it. We experimented with it, and we’re still experimenting with it. We recently did two designs for five-story residential buildings for a project with a master plan by MVRDV; we are rotating the stack of containers and cutting it on a slant and creating a completely different kind of configuration from what we’ve done in the past. People see now that we have an expertise with shipping containers, and they do come to us, as Puma did.
Jeff Stein: Thousands of us in Boston experienced Puma City when the Volvo Ocean Race was here last summer. It was fabulous: the overall form of Puma City exactly mirrored the new Institute of Contemporary Art on another pier just across the water.
Ada Tolla: It looked like a little kid right next to its mama.
Jeff Stein: Exactly. And several million dollars cheaper, too. But what was most fascinating was to see how you were able to make real spaces, both indoor and outdoor, by shifting the stacking of the containers a little bit and of course cutting between them. You use boxes, but the space that you create isn’t just about the box. It’s more complex. And more memorable and more fun. I wonder if the sense of movement that these things embody — the fact they’ve been places — affects your work in some way.
Ada Tolla: We do think about the idea of mobility — on two levels. There is the idea of mobile architecture, portable architecture. But even more intriguing is the idea of global culture: How can a project address our global culture in a positive way? So here are these boxes that people had been complaining about because they are accumulating because of the imbalance of trade. They are part of our global network. But with some creative effort, you see them in a completely different way.
Jeff Stein: And yet they keep their identity. You seem to know when to stop, how to keep your architecture from getting too fussy, so we can still recognize the found object. Where do you take this next?
Ada Tolla: I don’t know. We’ve done a lot of projects with containers; we’re very proud of that and will continue to work with them. But we are also continuing the exploration with other objects. Airplanes are something we’ve been fascinated with forever; like containers, there are growing numbers of decommissioned aircraft. We have done some recent projects that have allowed us to learn how an airplane is made, what you can do with it, and how you can transform it. You have to know which ones make sense to reuse and which ones don’t, because of transportation or cost.
Jeff Stein: I would think that there is another level of difficulty in working with airplanes — unlike containers, these things are shaped for a particular airflow. There’s a directionality to them.
Ada Tolla: But we always think that the limitations are also the potential, right?
Jeff Stein: Yes, that’s right. There’s no creativity without tight parameters.
Ada Tolla: The limitations of the airplane take you in a completely different direction — one that has great spatial and volumetric qualities, but is not formally driven. You don’t start by thinking you want to do this space as a curve. You end up with a different spatial experience because you merged these two fuselages or these five fuselages. And that is ultimately what intrigues us: the idea that all of a sudden we find ourselves interacting with different kinds of places and spaces that are surprising and strange, but exciting. The limitations are what push you and then, suddenly, you are inventing a new kind of space.
Puma City photos by Jeff Stein.
Arts & Minds (Part 4 of 4)
Profiles in the Creative Economy: An economy isn’t about policy; it’s about people.
I spoke to four people who solve old problems with new methods, who discover old solutions to new problems. They are combining interests and information in innovative ways. In doing so, they are building new communities. None of this work happens in solitude. It all requires a critical mass of resources: intellectual, technical, economic, and artistic. While the reach of these enterprises is international, they are rooted in local communities that encourage cross-fertilization between different kinds of expertise, that find new paths for knowledge and intuition. Art and commerce are once again becoming more comfortable with each other. In this new atmosphere we are seeing the results of a convergence of these two basic human impulses. It is a whole new world.
Peter MacDonald: lead artist for Rock Band, Harmonix Music Systems
Photo by Elliot Clapp.
Rock Band is one of the incredibly popular videogames developed by Harmonix Music Systems, Inc. in Cambridge, Massachusetts (others include Guitar Hero and Amplitude). In Rock Band, you and your band play gigs in clubs across the country and around the world, move up from van to tour bus, from simple chords to whole songs, from Seattle to Shanghai, doing everything (musically, at least) that real rock bands do, including hitting the camera. Playing these games, you navigate intense, intricately detailed visual and acoustical worlds. Peter MacDonald’s first job after college was as an architectural draftsman; after a year, he left that field to develop games.
Deborah Weisgall: Your industry has gone from cutting edge to mainstream in about 15 years. What was it like to invent games when you started out; how does it compare to what it’s like now?
Peter MacDonald: A small cadre of game developers has been plugging away since the late ’80s; I joined the industry in 1995, working for a startup. It took five or six years to publish our first game, and our team was a pretty scrappy, disorganized bunch. Everyone had a wide swath of responsibility and a lot of room for creativity because we were making up our own intellectual property as we went along. I was an environmental artist, applying some of what I’d picked up from architecture and a lot of what I’d picked up from fantasy novels to create a virtual 3D world. It was pretty fun, but in retrospect, we wasted a lot of time and didn’t really know what we were doing. Most of us were right out of college. In 1995, you couldn’t find experienced developers in Boston; there was a lot of talent coming out of the schools here, but not a lot of leadership. The whole company might be 20 or 30 people, mostly young, white, nerdy males.
Now the games I work on have budgets that are 10 times larger, and the teams and the company I work for are all 10 times larger. When I joined Harmonix four years ago, we had roughly 30 employees; now we have roughly 300. The game industry has matured; we have adopted standards and practices from other creative industries, and we strike a healthier work/ life balance. We’re making better games in a shorter amount of time and without as much stress. One downside, depending on how you look at it, is that an individual’s creative bubble of ownership has gotten smaller. On my first game, as an inexperienced artist, I created a whole world, almost entirely at my own whim. A junior environment artist on my team now will be able to build a handful of interior spaces under very close supervision.
Deborah Weisgall: How important is the location of Harmonix? Do you benefit from the critical mass of musicians and artists and high-tech people here?
Peter MacDonald: Absolutely. Harmonix was founded by two MIT graduates. Our art director went to the Rhode Island School of Design. I went to UMass Amherst. Many of our artists went to MassArt or RISD. However, most of the game industry is on the West Coast. In Seattle, if you were to go into a Starbucks and announce that you were starting a game company, you could be handed the résumés of several experienced developers before you finished your latte. Here in Boston, you need to attract a mix of raw talent out of all the universities, plus experienced developers who are willing to move back here. It’s kind of tough to find the people you need, but this is starting to change because companies like Harmonix are meeting with success and growing. I hope that young people in school in Boston will start looking locally before jumping on a plane to Seattle right away.
Deborah Weisgall: How do environments and characters grow?
Peter MacDonald: Harmonix’s games are unique in that the character and environment design are not closely integrated with the core gameplay. They have a supporting role. As a result, the artists have pretty free rein. We collaborate in small groups: five or six character artists on a game, with one leader and somebody like me overseeing all art. In terms of process, it’s pretty straightforward. We determine our needs, start drawing concepts, do group critiques, then more formal orthographic drawings to guide the 3D production. We hook up all the technology that will control the art assets, then it’s tested and fixed. By the time the consumer sees the game, dozens of people have “touched” it.
The technology is our medium, but technology does not dictate our aesthetic goals.
Deborah Weisgall: Perhaps you can talk about the scale of your audience, their attention span, turn rate: the kinds of things you think about when you make games.
Peter MacDonald: The biggest games sell millions of copies every year; when you think about architecture on that scale, you’re talking bridges, airports, and stadiums. Big stuff. I had a very small role on the design team for FedEx Field in Maryland. The stadium took perhaps 10 years from conception to opening day; Rock Band took one year. Then there’s the lifespan; we hope that the Rock Band franchise will last for decades, but that’s not typical in the games industry.
When we develop games, we spend a lot of time discussing the player experience. We use terms like “difficulty ramp,” “play cycles,” “hardcore,” “casual,” “stickiness,” “story-driven,” “achievement-driven,” and whether something is “family-friendly” — or not. We try to identify a target audience, though if you are working in an established genre, the audience has already shown itself. We spend a great deal of time on the core musical interface and experience. Every little detail is debated. How fast do screen elements move? How saturated are the colors? How much information is too much? We basically operate on the knife-edge of human sensory cognition. That’s how the game becomes challenging. If it moved any faster, or required the player to parse one more piece of information at the hardest levels, then it would become impossible and cross over from fun to frustrating.
Deborah Weisgall: How do you combine art and technology?
Peter MacDonald: The technology is our medium. Our products are experienced via a television screen and audio system, and interfaced by an instrument-shaped controller. That structure and the available technology define our limits. Technology is constantly changing, so we have to be adaptable; we are constantly learning. We try to exploit any new technology that might improve our game, but technology does not dictate our aesthetic goals. We might paint or draw characters that appear more detailed than we could achieve in the game for real, but it gives us a direction to aim for. The artists collaborate closely with the engineers who write our graphics software. We ask for the moon, and they work to give us the closest thing to the moon that the hardware can manage.
Rock Band 2 screenshot courtesy Harmonix Music Systems, Inc.
Arts & Minds (Part 3 of 4)
Profiles in the Creative Economy: An economy isn’t about policy; it’s about people.
I spoke to four people who solve old problems with new methods, who discover old solutions to new problems. They are combining interests and information in innovative ways. In doing so, they are building new communities. None of this work happens in solitude. It all requires a critical mass of resources: intellectual, technical, economic, and artistic. While the reach of these enterprises is international, they are rooted in local communities that encourage cross-fertilization between different kinds of expertise, that find new paths for knowledge and intuition. Art and commerce are once again becoming more comfortable with each other. In this new atmosphere we are seeing the results of a convergence of these two basic human impulses. It is a whole new world.
Susan Williams: creative director of Swans Island Blankets
Photo by Sarah Szwajkos.
Swans Island Blankets is a company based in Northport, Maine that produces handwoven blankets from flocks of local sheep. All the dyeing and weaving is done in an old house, and sheep pastured on a small island off the coast supply thick wool for winter blankets. The designs — single colors, subtle color blocks, and stripes — rely for their effectiveness on the natural shades of the wool and on vegetable dyes. Susan Williams, one of the owners and the creative director, has built an international clientele for their products.
Deborah Weisgall: How have you combined old-fashioned technology with modern marketing?
Susan Williams: I wanted to apply the aesthetic of the product to the company as a whole. There is a great story behind the company — John and Carolyn Grace left law careers in Cambridge to pursue a more satisfying life weaving classic blankets on Swans Island. We’ve moved the operation to the mainland, closer to where we live. The core issue is to introduce the blankets to a broader market without wrecking their integrity. I’ve captured the story on our website and in our printed materials; it’s no baloney when someone understands what “timeless beauty” means. Our aesthetic has substantially helped the company’s growth, which is part of the reason why we receive so much media coverage — we operate on a minuscule marketing budget.
Deborah Weisgall: How do you set goals for growth?
Susan Williams: Our goals for growth are more or less driven by our financial and human resources. There’s been some trial and error and postponing of great products — we produced some coats a couple of years ago that proved too labor-intensive and expensive. We quickly learned what we could accomplish while maintaining the highest standards, given the current scale of our business. We have four looms. Last March, when Michelle Obama wanted to give one of our throws to the prime minister of Ireland, we were lucky that we had a green one already on the loom.
We like to think of ourselves as the Slow Food of manufacturing, which probably sets us apart from other business models. We also offer a blanket hospital for cleaning and repairs. And this summer we introduced a line of yarns for hand-knitting, in colors that are consistent with our aesthetic.
Our aesthetic has substantially helped the company’s growth, which is part of the reason why we receive so much media coverage — we operate on a minuscule marketing budget.
Deborah Weisgall: How would you describe the satisfactions of the business?
Susan Williams: They come from knowing that I am contributing to making products that are genuinely exquisite, practical, and simple. Our customers come from all over the world; they are unimaginably varied.
Deborah Weisgall: What is Swans Island’s impact on the community?
Susan Williams: Obviously, we employ people — and it fits into this place because there are a lot of interesting and talented people running small businesses here. There seems to be a deep understanding and desire for our standard of quality — not only locally, but globally.
Photo courtesy Swan Islands Blankets.
Arts & Minds (Part 2 of 4)
Profiles in the Creative Economy: An economy isn’t about policy; it’s about people.
I spoke to four people who solve old problems with new methods, who discover old solutions to new problems. They are combining interests and information in innovative ways. In doing so, they are building new communities. None of this work happens in solitude. It all requires a critical mass of resources: intellectual, technical, economic, and artistic. While the reach of these enterprises is international, they are rooted in local communities that encourage cross-fertilization between different kinds of expertise, that find new paths for knowledge and intuition. Art and commerce are once again becoming more comfortable with each other. In this new atmosphere we are seeing the results of a convergence of these two basic human impulses. It is a whole new world.
Photo by Alex Budnitz.
Jill Kneerim: director and co-founder of Kneerim & Williams at Fish & Richardson
Jill Kneerim is a founding partner, along with John Taylor “Ike” Williams, and a director of the literary agency Kneerim & Williams at Fish & Richardson. The agency is based in Boston and has offices in Washington and New York. One of the most prestigious in publishing, Kneerim & Williams’ authors include former poet laureate Robert Pinsky, best-selling novelists Brad Meltzer and Sue Miller, and scholars Stephen J. Greenblatt, Caroline Elkins, Joseph Ellis, Dr. Susan Love, and Ned Hallowell. This year, the agency celebrates its 20th anniversary.
Deborah Weisgall: When you began, New York was the center of the publishing industry. Though Boston had two illustrious publishers, Houghton Mifflin and Little, Brown, pretty much every literary agent was in New York.
Jill Kneerim: When we first began, a lot of the writers said to us, Isn’t it a disadvantage for you to be in Boston, since New York is the hub of the publishing industry? I answered that an agent is only as good as her clients, and, if you’re good, everybody will pay attention. Now that question never arises. And communication has become much easier as well.
Deborah Weisgall: How much is Kneerim & Williams an outgrowth of the Boston intellectual community?
Jill Kneerim: The Boston area has the greatest concentration of colleges and universities of any city in the world, so it’s a natural that we start looking for writers in our own backyard. One of our specialties — taking academics into public life — grows out of my long-standing interest in making accessible the work of people who do not normally write for a broad audience. First of all, I look for people who write well. Many academics haven’t written for the general reader and sometimes could use advice about how to cast their ideas to make them appealing to that audience. I find that there are many people who are ready to try that, especially those who are mid-career and older, who already have tenure. It’s a daring young scholar who can afford to try that kind of writing. People in the academic world have exciting ideas, and when they are good writers, it’s a marvelous trip to be on with them. What’s at the core of speaking to a wider public is knowing how to tell a story.
All art bridges art and commerce, unless you’re living alone in a cave. There are so many ways these days in which artists and writers have to think about filthy commerce. We should stop resisting and learn that it’s part of the game.
Because I’m in Boston, I tend to have a lot of clients in the academic world. Deborah Grosvenor, who heads up our Washington office, has a list skewed towards people from the national press corps. She has more journalists than I do, and they’re writing policy books. We both do history, but I’m more likely to have an academic historian, while she has a journalist. I also think that being in Boston gives me an advantage because New York is so dominant in the book-writing business that it’s easy to forget that there’s any other place — and that people can look at the world differently from the way they do in New York.
Deborah Weisgall: How do you reconcile art and commerce?
Jill Kneerim: All art bridges art and commerce, unless you’re living alone in a cave. There are so many ways these days in which artists and writers have to think about filthy commerce. We should stop resisting and learn that it’s part of the game. And there’s a lot of fun in getting every kind of client out into the book world. With a journalist, I’ll have more of a chance to debate what the subject is going to be. Academics already have their specialties. I have one author who’s been working on his book for 10 years. First, he had to spend a couple of years mastering a complex foreign language in order to conduct interviews in that language. Now he has a body of material that nobody else in the world possesses. Caroline Elkins, who won the Pulitzer Prize for her book Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya, spent seven years gathering evidence. What I do is find someone whose ideas spark interest that would fire up a reader like me, who’s not a specialist. Some subjects are too narrow — size is important.
I’m on the commerce side, but I adore being part of the link between writers — who, frankly, have been my heroes all my life. There is no one more exciting or important than a writer. I love being mixed up with writers and making a difference.
Photos by Alex Budnitz.
Arts & Minds (Part 1 of 4)
Profiles in the Creative Economy: An economy isn’t about policy; it’s about people.
I spoke to four people who solve old problems with new methods, who discover old solutions to new problems. They are combining interests and information in innovative ways. In doing so, they are building new communities. None of this work happens in solitude. It all requires a critical mass of resources: intellectual, technical, economic, and artistic. While the reach of these enterprises is international, they are rooted in local communities that encourage cross-fertilization between different kinds of expertise, that find new paths for knowledge and intuition. Art and commerce are once again becoming more comfortable with each other. In this new atmosphere we are seeing the results of a convergence of these two basic human impulses. It is a whole new world.
Tricia Wilson Nguyen: principal of Fabric Works, Thistle Threads, and Redefined, Inc.
Tricia Wilson Nguyen combines an undergraduate interest in anthropology and archaeology, an undergraduate degree and doctorate in materials science and engineering — work on optical devices and high-tech fibers — with a lifelong passion for needlework and a knowledge of historical embroidery. She operates three companies simultaneously: Fabric Works is an engineering consulting company focusing on product design; she has designed textiles for use by the military, and this year collaborated with Polartec to launch a heated jacket. Redefined, Inc. uses current technology to manufacture “sewing cards,” Victorian perforated papers used for crossstitch designs, which became too expensive to produce at the end of the 19th century. In her capacity as the founder of Thistle Threads, she designs reproduction threads and teaches historical embroidery techniques. She has served as a textile consultant to the Metropolitan Museum in New York and is currently working with Plimoth Plantation.
Deborah Weisgall: You seem to combine your interests seamlessly, as it were: your scientific background, your interest in handwork, your historical knowledge. Expertise in one field flows into the other. How did this come about?
Tricia Wilson Nguyen: My lives converged when I was asked to solve a problem of integrating situational awareness systems, which combine GPS, location of squad members, information about terrain, and physiological monitors into an electronic map, a “heads-up display” that can enhance a soldier’s ability to negotiate the surroundings, possibly using the field of electronic textiles. The natural solution was to route the cables through the fabrics they wore, instead of using plastic cables, which would be snag hazards. This is when I discovered the work going on in the not-yet-named field of electronic textiles. It was a natural for me, as I had optics, materials, systems, and high-tech textile experience. It was my knowledge of Victorian-era millinery that gave us the idea of making textile-based USB cables in a ribbon format; this led to my first manufacturing partners.
Because electronic textiles fuses two very disparate fields, everyone involved was at some disadvantage. As both an engineer and embroiderer, I could understand both technology bases. The engineers respected my ability to thread a needle, and people involved with the textile world trusted me because I could speak their language. I was stunned that when we met with the Army, my colleague would bring up my historic embroidery business as a technical qualification.
I’ve realized that to make true progress when you don’t have a great number of resources at your disposal, you have to make art, science, and business coexist.
And my technological edge has allowed me to distinguish my historical research because few art historians would approach the problems in the way an engineer would. I can sometimes clear my head and look at objects from the standpoint of “how and who” because I have both hands-on experience and the technological means to translate that experience into a new analytical technique.
In product development, you look for short-run manufacturing facilities that can make complex metal threads; I do the same thing — work with artisan manufacturers — in the historic threads area. Often the technique or calculations I do for one area can be immediately translated to the other. It’s important to understand product design and the economics of manufacturing. In the historic embroidery or restoration fields, the people who need new threads usually aren’t prepared to help the manufacturer develop a market that can justify the effort involved in making such a thread. I have founded several outlets for that kind of development, though, so I can help engineer the product and market it for hobbyists. Then I turn around and introduce some of them to the e-textiles field.
Deborah Weisgall: You proceed from the premise that art and science and commerce can coexist and reinforce each other.
Photo by Genie Posnett.
Tricia Wilson Nguyen: I’ve realized that to make true progress when you don’t have a great number of resources at your disposal, you have to make art, science, and business coexist. I don’t see them as antithetical to each other. Let me give you an example: When I have to grapple with the problems of scaling-up and capitalizing a new thread, I start thinking about the inventory costs associated with the range of materials that go into making that thread. Weeks later, I see a piece of complex historic embroidery with as many as eight variants of complex composite threads — threads we have trouble making today — in about 10 color combinations each. Now, historians attribute this embroidery to 12-year-old girls. Knowing that these threads were made of expensive components, I start thinking about a 17th-century mercer [dealer in textiles] and his need to turn over inventory by selling to 12-year-old girls. Something just doesn’t jive. I think, maybe it wasn’t a girl, but a professional. Then I think about manufacturing on demand, and whether a small number of raw materials could be turned into such a large variety by using the spinning-wheel technologies they had available to them. Then I wonder again if we could use such techniques today to reduce the need for a range of reproduction materials by teaching hobbyists to make their own variants from simple components. And that leads me to make short runs of e-textiles threads to try out concepts for antennas in a costefficient manner. So commerce educates history, which, in turn, educates technology development. It’s synergistic, and usually it revolves around the reality of current and past economics.
Deborah Weisgall: How important to the success of your enterprises is the community in which you live — not so much the neighborhood, but the intellectual community?
Tricia Wilson Nguyen: I couldn’t be doing what I am doing if I didn’t live in such an entrepreneurial high-tech area that is also at a nexus of textile history. Many of my clients or producers are remnants of the textile industry in Massachusetts. Living close to them allows me to raise a family while keeping my engineering skills sharp. Also, the two most important collections in the US of the type of embroidery I research are within three hours of home, and England is only an airplane ride away. I often doubleup on business trips; I see a historic collection and research primary sources at libraries when I travel to teach embroidery or visit clients and manufacturing partners. When my husband and I were deciding where to live — we have the dual PhD problem — there were only five places that could support our fields. We chose Boston because we’d both gone to MIT. This fall, I’m guest lecturing at the Media Lab there — talking about 17th-century embroidery to an engineering group. I couldn’t do that type of cross-disciplinary work in most cities. Deborah Weisgall: You have taken what has been considered “women’s work” — though it was not in Tudor England — and added to it a technological dimension. How has that influenced your career? Tricia Wilson Nguyen: Certainly having a PhD from a hardcore engineering discipline has given me a level of credibility when discussing textiles and embroidery — something that has been debased and relegated to “women’s work” in the last 200 years. I try never to apologize for my feminine side. As a young woman, I made it in some of the toughest male-dominated situations: MIT, a PhD program, and leading a grueling military development program. I have my war wounds, and know how to turn someone who makes a snarky comment into an enthusiastic listener by adding just the right amount of serious tech talk. And often the men take my expertise in handwork more seriously than the women.
Photo (top) by Ted Curtin.
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