Walking toward downtown on Fifth Avenue from Central Park south, the first important jewel dangles on the corner of 57th street, a glamorous glowing snake. It is a 204-foot long light sculpture that designs the exquisite ‘Serpenti’ Bvlgari 2012 creation. The figure of the reptile swings out of the architecture of the prestigious Crown Building like a luxurious lavaliere. The gigantic dimensions of the animal amaze the eye of the observers. People crowd the corner of the avenue to take pictures of this glittering lush monster. Millions of pulsing light bulbs create the snake’s structure. Desperately, the bright reflections want to emulate the classic rainbow reflectance of brilliant diamonds and precious stones. Unfortunately, walking fifteen feet closer to the sculpture reveals a porous structure, full of holes and visible electrical cables, which make it looks trashy and cheap. It is world-renowned that the snake is the Bvlgari icon, which is connoted of mysterious sensuality and timeless beauty. The only visible artifact is a mutilated animal that is looking for a way to escape out from the architecture. Looking at the reptile from the sidewalk in front of the building has nothing to do with lust and suggestiveness. Certainly, the three dimensional craft surprises the viewers for a few minutes, but then observing the external decoration starts to become an uncomfortable experience. The position in which the body of the serpent is shaped is far from evoking a smooth and rounded female sensual body. Geometrical forms that create a repetition of half cones compose the snake. These metal structures are thought as endless fans that overlap with each other, shaping a fish scales pattern covered by flashy white electrical bulbs. From the other side of the avenue the composition create an illusion that reminds one of bright signals of amusement parks. The feeling is the same as being in a fancy Disneyjeweleryland for adults, and it is hard to experience the appeal of the gorgeous real ‘Serpenti’ necklace.

Walking one block south on Fifth Avenue there is the whimsical house of Harry Winston jewelry, Winston Wonderland. The 18th century French-style facade of the building is decorated with emerald pine branches and three dimensional football size plastic diamonds. The iconic design of the jewelry, the Winston Cluster, composed by three ogival elliptic shapes adorns moldings and apertures. The ornaments are balanced and proportioned to the size of the structure. Each window has its own tiara and bracelet of diamonds that elegantly frame the moldings. Millions of tiny lights shine in the middle of the dark leaves to highlight the reflectance of the brilliants. This arrangement creates a successful glowing halo around the building. The ambiance is exaggerated by thousands of glittery and sparkling lights and reflectors. The edifice looks like “A Diamonds” sanctuary, a holy place where pilgrims pay homage to rich sumptuous lavishness. Harry Winston building has created an open air exhibition of precious stones. People are almost afraid to walk closer to it and touch the artifacts. The architecture is thought as the base where thousands of birthstones are embedded. The ten inches fake diamonds on the facades are enclose in the typical cages that the jeweler craftsmen use to include the bright real rocks into the creations. The ornaments are materially hooked in the settings and become an integrant part of the architecture. The gorgeous balanced composition makes the diamonds look bigger and brighter. They seem more untouchable than ever. They scream, “You will never have me!” Harry Winston decorates the building using its jewelry master qualities, making people subject spectators of the jewelry’s opulence and elegance.

Walking a few blocks south a huge red ribbon pops up on the facade of the 1917 Cartier Building. The sophisticated French jewelry chose its famous red velvet box as the theme of its Christmas decorations this year. Trillions of lights carefully create a bow of monumental size that wraps the structure in an enormous present. The edifice is like a Russian matryoshka – a box that contains a box that contains other infinite boxes. The frames of the windows are ornate with green branches and different sizes of the typical cardinal container. The flags on the main facade swell with the wind to emulate the red box. The pine trees positioned on the sidewalk are decorated with the Cartier packages. The brilliants are not the objects of desire. It is the red container the dream of people. Tourists crowded the sidewalk near the entrance. They create long waiting lines for taking picture with the desired object: The Red Box. They hold it, they smile to it, and they wink to it and, click, a picture! In front of the shop there is traffic of Cartier pilgrims that anxiously want to spend the glorious moment with the red box. The loved subjects are managed like Hollywood super stars. There are two mischievous panthers on the building that control the crowd of fans. This animal is the famous Cartier icon, symbol of devastating seduction, mysterious beauty. The felines are made by yellow tiny lights, which create two three-dimensional corps hanged on the edifice’s facade. One animal climbs the wall near the Fifth avenue corner, while the other sits on the handrail of the balcony swinging its tail in the air. People are definitely intrigued by these two building’s guardians. Some of them, attentively, film the scene like if it would be a journey in the jungle. First, close up to the box, then the panthers, then the ensemble. The crowd is impatiently waiting in line its turn with the carmine box. But finally, the hasty second with the friend next to the red super star (the box).

I have never worn a hundreds of thousands of dollar diamond necklace. I have never opened one of these famous red boxes. However, I am sure that the feeling has nothing in common with standing on a cold day on the crowded Fifth Avenue sidewalks taking picture of your friend standing and smiling in front of some of the best jewels shops in the world. Perhaps, like Kahlil Gibran said that the time’s definition of coal is the diamond, also the decorations made by plastic, lights, and artifacts one day will become precious jewels for everyone. Today, the mass cares about taking pictures of a package instead of admiring a precious jewel, like the Cartier’s pilgrims wishing for a photo with ‘the carmine super star’. People are scared by what is most similar to the reality, like when they are afraid to go closer to the facades of the Harry Winston Building. We like to be amused by the unbalanced and the surreal artifacts, which is distant from the world where we reside. We silently repeat to our self that fantasyland is reality. It becomes a mantra and then truth. We cannot realize anymore the proper proportion of the concrete world.

Take the Bone China Mag Cup by Muji. Look at the slightly upwards and inwards tapering of its silhouette, its delicate proportions, and the simple joint between the cup and handle. Sit it in your hand, nestle it slightly into your palm. Feel how it sits there, its edges and curves gently molding the fleshy part of your palm around its form. There is a tactility to its smoothness that is comforting. Grab that string that’s next to you, the stuff that’s slightly softer and much smoother than twine. Now, start to coil it around and around the inside of the cup, pushing it gently into the sides as you wind it up towards the top, stopping just before you break the lip. The texture that’s left as you pull it out again, that’s the texture of the inside of this cup. It’s gets better. Look at its color. A subtle blue hue within the white of the porcelain. It’s not just the lighting, although you might think so at first. There is a delicate pale blue emanating from the small stringlike indentations, softening the inside, adding a slight blur to the contours. This is beauty, in the palm of your hand.

As you begin to use the cup it becomes a part of a routine. You learn the perfect amount of coffee to brew for one, two, three cups of joe, and the perfect place to put your fingers to avoid getting burnt while the contents are piping hot. The more you know about the cup, the more it’s story combines with your story, the greater your appreciation for it grows.

This is what beauty needs. Detail and duration. It is not the object alone, but the details of the object that make it beautiful. To look at something many times and you continue to appreciate it, not seeing only these descriptions, but feeling them viscerally. Beauty grows with knowledge but knowledge can also foil beauty, unravelling it right there in front of your eyes, in your eyes.

Imagine now, sitting upon your palm, a small somewhat chubby porcelain cat that you found at Pearl River. She sits comfortably on her haunches, her left front paw planted upon your palm and her right held up in front of her as if about to paw at something. She means no harm, she has no claws. Instead she has a hole. Her right paw is a spout, explaining the hole in her back. While this may sound delightfully fun and playful, look at her closely. Now squint your eyes until you can barely see her through your eyelashes. She how fuzzy and undefined her features get? That’s how she really looks: undefined. With very little for the light to catch and create shadows she looks rotund, heavy, and ungainly. There is something almost grotesque in the cat’s dulled features and lack of defined character. It is missing simple complexity.

You may deem this little milk jug fun, quirky, or even desirably kitsch. Irony is the new black and you’re no grinch. You appreciate playful objects. Sitting alongside your plate of toast, looking “oh so cute”, you don’t doubt it’s great fun to pour milk from the belly of a kitty, via its paw, into your Sunday morning cup of Earl Grey. Its pleasure is pure revelry in novelty.

Don’t deny it, your appreciation for the Mag Cup is beauty through the eyes of the beholder. The relationship between your hand, the cup’s form, and the delight you gain from watching coffee slip down the dents on its interior is as personal and subjective as it can get. But, can the cat’s novelty sustain your attention as the cup does? Will you look forward to using her in the morning while you’re drifting off to sleep at night the way that some people dream of breakfast even before the wee hours have begun? You won’t.

Novelty is fleeting. Beauty matures.

Besides being sold at kitschy shops like Pearl River in SoHo and beautifying my grandmother’s apartment, I have seen these plant lookalikes decorating public bathrooms, hotels, restaurant tables and also graveyards and memorials. There are poorly manufactured as well as nicer handmade ones. Be it the Tyrol or the Slavic region, West or East, they can be found everywhere in different forms for different tastes.

One reasonable justification for artificial flowers is allergies. Otherwise it is hard for me to see a reason why plants and flowers should be replaced by imitations. Nevertheless, I believe if someone has the need to decorate, they are making an effort to create a more beautiful space. Therefore the objects they choose must somehow represent beauty.

The desire to decorate with artificial flowers is a longstanding tradition; it was and is still considered an art form. In Egypt artificial flowers were made from shavings of stained horns, in China from rice paper or silk. Ancient Romans showed their wealth and decadence with flowers made of gold and silver. The tradition of making silk flowers traveled from China to Europe with trade. In different centers throughout Europe the design of silk flowers became delicate art practiced by skilled craftsmen. In the early 20^th Century silk flower arrangements became fashionable items in America. Later the exquisite art form was made marketable, democratized; it became part of mass production and lost its value.

However, the fact that they have a history, and that lots of people regard them as beautiful, does not make it any easier for me to see the aesthetic value of fake flowers. Moreover, arguing over taste here does not seem to yield an answer.

Maybe it is my first encounter with fake flowers, which were generic, mass-produced, made of synthetic polyester fabric that destroyed my willingness to value them. These first ones encountered were trying to look like real flowers but never deceived. Though some fake flowers may give a real impression, after touching and smelling the aura of real fades. The disappointment leaves no positive feelings. There is no beauty in lying.

Flowers are not the only ones that imitate the real and living. In fashion there are brooches shaped as insects or earrings shaped as bananas. I wouldn’t consider the latter as the embodiment of beauty but also not the same type of misguidance that artificial flowers express or try to achieve. Lifeless flowers are trying to act as real flowers, taking up their purpose without ever accomplishing it.

Beauty is personal. It is personally perceived. My need to experience or the lack of experience with artificial flowers is different from my grandmother’s. She will not love her plastic beauties less when I happen to dislike them or explain my objections. Finding an object beautiful in many cases seems to depend on symbolism, beliefs, a state of mind, and experiences from past and present. I would like to add that the object must be of good quality. But this is just another, my personal approach. Fake flowers contradict the idea of real flowers, which are meant to have a life cycle – grow, consume, bloom, smell and wilt. The beauty lies in experiencing all or some of it. My grandmother loves artificial flowers almost in general; they don’t even need to be handmade or perfect. Regardless of how misguided an idea of beauty they represent, she finds beauty in their promise of everlasting life.

The fan is a simple object. Light, compact and priced at $1.25, it’s crafted from humble sandalwood veneers likely mass-produced from a factory in China. It’s not an obvious choice. But upon holding the fan, I was comforted by the symmetry of its parts. I admired the laser-cut precision of its stamped pattern and amused by the variation in the wood grain that foiled its perfection.  I’ve owned many similar sandalwood fans in my life but never considered them beautiful until that moment. And perhaps this was the key: the moment. I began to think of beauty as an encounter—the reciprocal act of revelation and attention between the object and the viewer.

The most beautiful objects are faceted and dimensional. Beauty offers layers, variance, perhaps even mystery. The fan offers several moments of pleasure. Closed, it’s an efficient object that feels reassuring in one’s hand. Opened, it reveals an interesting pattern reminiscent of oriental screens or even the fins atop of the Chrysler Building. The act of opening and closing it is also pleasurable to witness — a swift and playful shape shifting coupled with a gentle swooshing sound. But perhaps its loveliest aspect is revealed when animated. Once you start fanning yourself, the light scent of sandalwood perfumes the breeze around you. It’s a faint smell but enough to inspire a reverie or at least banish any offensive odors nearby. The best examples of beauty not only engage the eye but the breadth of our faculties.

In the midst of the viewer, an object of beauty can even transcend its original utilitarian intent. When I picked up the fan, I was struck by the sensation of homesickness. I grew up in a hot climate where a fan is as essential as a cell phone. The fan is used to show status, as in the case of expensive lace and ebony types. At times, it served as a makeshift shade against the high noon glare, a fly swatter to ward off pesky tropical bugs from your food, or even a duster to banish crumbs from a park bench. A fan could cover up a pimple, muffle a sneeze or hide a smile. The fan can also be used to show affection, as when a suitor or a parent takes the fan from your hands and fans you. My dad still does this for me.

The newly minted MacArthur fellow Chris Thiele once said that great art has the ability to disarm the body, the mind and the soul. I think that the same can be said about beauty. More than a passive appraisal, the viewer experiences an epiphany. It’s a surprising, perhaps even shocking act of discovery. The phrase “to be struck by beauty,” is apt here. Walking around the store, I was waiting to be confounded. I was desperate to experience wonder amidst the aisles of merchandise. Sure, there were more obvious choices to hinge a thesis on – covetable lightweight luggage, well-made gloves, quirky tea packaging. In selecting the fan, I was surprised at how taken I was with a familiar object. To recognize the glimmer of genius in plainness or chaos is to experience something indelible. To see beauty is to be awakened from a stupor.

I’ve always been dubious of the expression, “beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” It seems to propose that beauty is always at the mercy of a critic’s mercurial moods. It almost sounds like an apology or perhaps a consolation. Calling a decrepit tract home beautiful and praising the beauty of Grand Central in the same breath seemed oxymoronic. Does “beauty” really mean anything when used so liberally? I despaired at the thought.

But perhaps beauty is dependent on the experience. As we regard an object with our attention, we affirm its beauty. In exchange, we are affirmed by its gifts. We are symbiotic. The key to beauty lies neither in an object’s surface symmetry nor solely on a viewer’s aesthetic criteria. It lies in their encounter, in their mutual generosity. Beauty is in the phenomenon.

Long Island City, once the home to factories and industrial plants, is rebranding itself as an idyllic residential hamlet of glimmering apartment towers with stunning views and covetable amenities — a viable option for the urbanite with a growing family.  When it was once about blue-collar grit, tar, coal, it’s quickly transforming to be about jogging paths, playgrounds and doggy daycare.

Strolling along the idyllic Gantry Plaza State Park esplanade, it’s hard to imagine the brownfields or even the industrial corridor that this strip of land once was. This community feels modern, fresh and scrubbed of its history. That is until we arrive at the foot of the giant Pepsi-Cola sign.

The 120-ft long sign used to sit atop the Pepsi-Cola bottling plant that closed in 1999. Rendered in the fluid scroll script of the Pepsi logo from 70 years ago, the sign might look anachronistic, even ironic, for the uninitiated newcomer, especially with the actual building now long gone. Cleaned and restored to its vivid ruby-red color, the sign even looks new. But for those who consider the sign as part of their familiar landscape, it means more.

To me, reinstalling the sign in the waterfront is both a romantic and a pragmatic gesture. The sign is a touchstone to a shared past. It signifies a connection to the days of toil and commerce—a tattoo or even a birthmark. It speaks of tenacity and steadfastness, perhaps a counterpoint to the luxury buildings that now surround it. It’s the same instinct at play for keeping that patch of black tar on the resplendently restored Grand Central ceiling. Not just a point of comparison, it’s an evidence of our progress and evolution.

A sign is also a location marker. When change occurs, especially one as dramatic as that in the Long Island City waterfront, everything around it necessarily shifts. Changes in a community affect not just those within its perimeters but also those living along its borders and beyond. As change compel us to recalibrate our former paths and routines, a sign gives a sense of orientation. By standing its ground, a sign, helps us discern where we are and where we’re going — as a pedestrian and as an evolving community.  The Pepsi Sign is a neon beacon that guides our path.

The sign is a shrine or an epitaph. It’s a meeting place and a trigger for exchange for the newcomer and the old-timer. It’s been well documented on blogs that former Pepsi-Co employees make the pilgrimage here to take a picture and reminisce about the old days with their families.  By providing this junction, there’s an opportunity for the old and the new to converge and possibly feel at home.

The concept of “nostalgia” inevitably comes to play here. The word traces its roots to the concept of homecoming, more complex than the pejorative “wistfulness” that we associate with it these days. I think it relates to a rediscovery of our roots in relationship to our ongoing search for definition. The sign is a totem to our identity—the Pepsi-Cola sign as a critical component of New York City’s existential word cloud. Our prosperity came from industrialization, innovation and hard work. Let us not forget it.

Change is a wrecking ball. It begins with the great forward momentum that levels both past sins and triumphs to accommodate a new future. With demolition, we reclaim a ground zero, a new slate for building an improved Ur. But radical change can obliterate the past so effectively that we become disoriented in our old surroundings.  A marker, like the Pepsi-Cola sign is vital because it provides a rope if not an anchor to our formation. The sign reminds us that we are built on layers of toil, bedrock and history. Despite the newly leveled ground and the detoxified brownfields, nothing is ever tabula rasa. We are part of a continuum, ever-evolving, ever-changing. Thankfully, there are still signs the horizon to remind us so.

When I first began teaching in the D-Crit progam, a few people asked me what in the world was I thinking. Magazines were dying like flies. Newspapers were decimating their culture sections and firing their arts critics. The journalism world had become dog-eat-dog. As a dog with a job, did I really want to train people who might very likely replace me?

The answer was yes. Absolutely. Design is changing radically. Journalism is changing radically. But neither is disappearing. Instead, both are undergoing the same kind of transformation, detaching themselves from solid objects and surfaces and moving into an immaterial realm. We describe this realm as one of lightning-quick, electrical impulses, but that is just another way of saying that is all about intelligence. The designer who creates strategies and systems rather than products — as more and more designers do — is working in a medium of pure intelligence. And the journalist who tracks, explains and evaluates such efforts is operating in that medium, too.

We need intelligent journalists more than ever. And it has been my great fortune for the past three years to spend part of every fall semester in their company. In my D-Crit class on reporting tools, my students and I discuss the institutional and ethical challenges to design journalism, from cozy relationships between writers and their subjects to the obstructions produced by advertisers to the tyranny of the image in a world where eye candy is everything.

It is a cliché — but a heartfelt one — to say that my students regularly humble me. Take Vera Sacchetti, who graduated last year, after writing a thesis that challenged the value of contemporary journalism about social design. Vera was in an excellent position to observe this subject, having interned with me at Change Observer, the website I cofounded with Bill Drenttel that is dedicated to contemporary journalism about social design. Her skepticism was well founded, though provoking and utterly welcome.

As you’re about to observe from their presentations this afternoon, D-Crit students are deep thinkers. The students in this class awe me with their passion for their subjects. Along with the journalist’s concern for relevance, they have the burrowing habits of a typical graduate student, piling up information at the leisurely pace that an MFA education allows, so that they have achieved encyclopedic mastery. Ask Erin Routson anything about public housing. Or Barbara Eldredge anything about guns. Then sit back with a cool drink — or a pitcherful of them.

This class also impresses me with its sense of community. I met a tight group of colleagues last fall that has only grown closer through the ordeal of thesis research and writing. The ultimate mark of their collegiality was that, after months of monomaniacal devotion to their topics, they found echoes in each other’s work that formed the topics for today’s panels.

Writing in 1971, Victor Papanek urged that “design must become an innovative, highly creative, cross-disciplinary tool responsive to the true needs of men. It must be more research-oriented, and we must stop defiling the earth itself with poorly-designed objects and structures.”

Today, many designers are answering the call for creativity, cross-disciplinary approaches, research and rigor. But it is the design critic’s job to ensure that they are answering it effectively. Where designers go, critics must follow, through the airy, twitchy medium in which both are immersed. More educational programs have evolved to train design writers in this pursuit. I welcome every one of them, even if they do send me into an early retirement. And I particularly acknowledge the astonishing work of Alice Twemlow, who has added so many important facets to the conversation about contemporary design, not just by turning D-Crit into a training ground for the watchdogs and explicators of the future but also by organizing conferences like this that invite the public in, and keep our attention focused on the moment.

Finally, congratulations to the 10 graduates of this year’s class: Anna, Ann, Katya, Derrick, Erin, Cheryl, Julia, Amna, Tara, and Barbara. I am only one of your instructors and yet I dare your own parents to feel prouder of you.

It is now time for me to turn over the floor the first keynote speaker, Stuart Ewen, distinguished professor in the department of film & media studies at Hunter College, as well as a professor in history, sociology and American studies at CUNY graduate Center. He will be introducing the panel called “Calculated Nostalgia.” Stuart…

Chapels were not originally part of the program of the airport as it originated in the 1920s. In 1945, an Eastern Airways employee by the name of Edwin Hogg began to campaign for a chapel to be built at Boston Logan International Airport in part so fellow employees would have the opportunity to worship between shifts or on breaks. [1] Its patronage expanded to travelers faced with bereavement flights, anxious about air travel, or just looking for an opportunity to worship between destinations. This first incarnation was aimed specifically at Catholics and officially named “Our Lady of the Airways.” It had all the trappings of a traditional Catholic chapel: a circular wooden railing surrounded an altar over which a large statue of Mary presided. This kind of adaptation of the ornate Catholic space became the form for other chapels that were built in airports like Chicago-O’Hare, New York’s JFK (named Our Lady of the Skies, similar to Boston), and the now-destroyed Cleveland Hopkins. All of these contained a large central cross over an altar, surrounded by generic waiting-room style upholstered chairs of various (and sometimes, by the look of them, dubious) quality. Chairs appear in rows resembling pews, or radiate from the altar in a semi-circle. In spaces at Cleveland Hopkins and JFK, colorful stained glass windows flanked the altar, hearkening back to more traditional free-standing religious spaces. The root of the form is directly tied to the Catholic chapel that it sought to emulate, aided by the agency of chaplains and diocese who rented the space from the airport itself.

As chapels began to appear in airports across the country, the form morphed from that of a Catholic chapel to that of a non-denominational Christian space. Cleveland destroyed its former chapel in 2008 with the aim of making a new, smaller space “less Catholic.” [2] While crosses still hung over altar spaces at the front of the room, the traditional Virgin Mary statues and other paraphernalia associated with Catholicism were eliminated or diminished. Chapels now held imagery that could be stretched across denominations; doves, trees, and lambs are often the subject of stained glass and artwork that hang in addition to or in place of the cross and other Catholic iconography. Spaces like Orlando, Miami and Washington-Dulles capitalize on this form – being less prescriptive in terms of religious belief allows for more people of faith to utilize the space. The layout and furniture remain the same; upholstered (and sometimes, unfortunately for those spending a long layover, just plain plastic) chairs, in rows and recessed fluorescent lighting. Neutral colors dominate, ranging from muted greens to tans and off-whites. The non-denominational spaces are much less decorated than their Catholic predecessors, most likely because their funding no longer comes from a diocese but from the airport itself.

The most recently created airport chapel spaces differ the most from the original typeform of Our Lady of the Airways. They do away with most spiritual or religious art and iconography. Known as “interfaith chapels” or “meditation rooms”, these spaces strip away almost all ornament. Interfaith chapels may contain rows of chairs, an “altar” of sorts, and due to increased acknowledgment of religions aside from Christianity, a Muslim prayer rug facing in the appropriate direction and omission of the cross, allowing for those who practice Judaism to also benefit. Without any kind of iconographic restraint, the interfaith space can take any direction its user wants. In Atlanta, there is merely a large representation of the graphic icon for “Prayer”, a simplified person kneeling, that directs travelers to the room itself over the altar; icon worship at its most basic. Aside from rows of chairs and a small bookshelf, there is no decoration. Pittsburgh also uses this model, making the room seem more like a church in a temporary space than an oasis for weary travelers. Here, the interfaith chapel falls right in line with the “non-place” aesthetic seen throughout the rest of the airport. While the space offers silence and chance for reflection, its complete lack of character makes it seem like something has been lost compared to the colorful, more complex appearance of the original chapels.

In some cases, though, the idea of an interfaith chapel or meditation room has produced abstract and powerful new forms. Washington-Reagan offers a space that is strangely intimate and comforting. Large upholstered chairs face one another in a square, ringed by bench seating on the outside. This unusual placement offers travelers an opportunity to have time to themselves, but also to encourage comforting one another or having dialogue. The space is void of any decoration, but its warm and bright lighting seeks to reassure the traveler. In an even further break from the form, San Francisco International Airport’s interfaith space is open and bright, with plenty of plants and seating. Large windows offer plenty of natural light, as opposed to the fluorescent lighting of other, more generic spaces. Without being drab or boring, it offers travelers a space to worship, contemplate, and rest. This abandonment of the typical “leftover office space” vernacular of other airport chapels brings back the consideration of the early Catholic chapels without having to depend on religious materials. In this sense, the form has been reinterpreted and secularized.

The question is, does getting away from the traditional notion of a chapel mean something is lost? When an “interfaith chapel” is merely a room with a grouping of chairs and a large icon hung on the wall, does it retain any ties at all to faith? No matter the appearance, according to chaplains across the nation, chapel visitation has been up one-third since the events of September 11th, 2001. [3] While some spaces seem more relaxing and welcoming than others (I’d rather spend my moments of contemplation in San Francisco than say, Pittsburgh), perhaps just the set-aside nature of a chapel as a “place” within a non-place is enough to offer travelers of any – or no – denomination peace.

Sources:
[1] Harvard University Pluralism Research Report – http://pluralism.org/reports/view/82
[2] Cleveland Airport Considers Making Chapel “Less Catholic” – http://www.wkyc.com/news/local/story.aspx?storyid=90238
[3] “Airport chapels help flyers keep the faith, or just relax” – http://www.usatoday.com/travel/news/2004-12-20-chapel-usat_x.htm

“How much time you got?” he asked the powder-faced redheaded woman working the counter.

“How much time you need?”

“I just watched the cops beat the shit out of somebody,” the EMT said to all of us. “He was being stupid.”

He ordered a large coffee with double cream, and proceeded to tell us the convoluted story. He spoke with a flat affect and blank eyes. It was a robbery/assault at some house “by the train station.” He’d waited outside with the woman who had called 911. She kept telling him to go inside and help the man who’d been assaulted. “‘He’s spitting up, you gotta get in there.’ And I told her again,” he said, “‘I can’t go into a violent situation before the police get here, so we’ll have to wait for the police.’”

It took the police over half an hour to get there, and so they waited on the sidewalk while the woman grew steadily more agitated, railing about it being the EMT’s duty to save lives. She said, “I’m going in to get him! If he dies while we’re waiting and you aren’t helping him, I’m gonna sue the city.” The EMT replied, “Well, that’s a great idea, ma’am. Because in case you haven’t heard, the city’s broke. They don’t have the money to pay my pension. They’re taking away retirement benefits. I’m suing the city. So you can just get in line.”

“That’s Detroit,” said the lanky blue-eyed counterman, with a laugh. He had white hair and was probably of the first generation of Appalachian migrants to come to the city.

The young, pale fry cook, who seemed a bit slow-minded, started saying something about a stabbing that had happened around the corner earlier that night.

“When?” asked the EMT.

“About 9:30.”

“Wonder where we were … The other day we went out to Harper and Cadieux,” he said, naming an intersection clear on the other side of town. Detroit takes in a sprawling 140 square miles, just under 30 percent of which is vacant (the emptied properties alone occupy an area nearly the size of San Francisco); emergency services here have the worst response time in the nation because there aren’t enough staff to cover the ground. “A guy’d been shot with an AK-47,” the EMT continued. “Lying in the middle of the street. They waited half an hour — half an hour — to call an ambulance.”

Fry cook: “That guy isn’t alive anymore.”

EMT: “Well I had better get going … ”

He took his cup of coffee, paid absently, thanked the waitress, and left without explaining how the first story had devolved into the police beating the man in the house.

As he drove the ambulance back off the curb, the woman said, “I seen him on TV.”

“He’s the union rep,” the older, gap-toothed man explained. “That’s why.”

“I see him on TV all the time … Need anything, honey?” she asked, turning to me.

What can I tell you about Detroit that isn’t contained by that story? There’s Telway and a score of hamburger stands and diners like it, vestiges of the gritty, working-class mid-20th century city that would have been pushed out anywhere else but that hang on here. The EMT is just one of the beleaguered, unionized blue-collar workers who bear the brunt of the violence and disorder that stalk the urban poor. It is common for city first responders to live in the suburbs themselves: over half the Detroit police force live outside the city, and the number is estimated to be higher for firefighters and EMTs. The city used to require its employees to live inside Detroit, but the law was controversially repealed in 1999, which led to massive suburban flight among emergency responders and other city employees. The current mayor, David Bing, has an initiative called “Project 14” to lure police to live in the city again with massive subsidies (“14” is police code for “return to normal operations”). Bing argues that having police live inside city neighborhoods bulwarks safety. Detroit police who live in the suburbs counter that the city — with its high insurance rates, limited services, and poor school options — is a very difficult place to raise a family.

The “train station” the EMT referred to is Michigan Central, the most renowned symbol of Detroit’s ruination. It stands 18 stories tall, once magnificent and now in distress — all pocked window-frames and crumbling arches. You can see the sky clear through it. When people here give directions it’s simply “the train station” — from which no trains have departed since Ronald Reagan was president. That’s the ghost city that runs parallel to present-day Detroit.

Over the last 60 years, the city has lost 1.3 million residents from its 1950 peak of 2 million. The continual bleed of people moving to suburbs and other regions of the country means that Detroit’s current population is as low as it has been since 1910. The massive abandonment has invidious, far-reaching effects for the Detroiters who remain. Over the last year, there have been an average of 35 major fires a day in the city. A lack of maintenance funds and property abandonment mean it is not uncommon for power lines to hang low over the empty houses and cracked sidewalks. Last September, a combination of dry weather, high winds, and downed power lines caused 85 fires to break out in one 24-hour period. Five suburban fire departments were called in to help Detroit’s department combat the blazes. Whole blocks were incinerated. Louvenia Wallace, a hair stylist and mother of three whose east side duplex burned, told a reporter from the Detroit Free Press: “It was like blankets of smoke were everywhere, and the next thing I knew everybody’s house was on fire … My kids couldn’t sleep because it smells like smoke … My daughter is asthmatic, so she can’t be around here, no way … I don’t have the money to just move.”

An editorial in the following day’s paper concluded that though the 58 Detroit fire companies available worked “doggedly and admirably” they were “overmatched to an unsettling degree.” The tragedy was no aberration. Plummeting home values mean few people can recover anywhere near what they paid for their houses, whereas insurance pays back the replacement value, creating a perverse incentive for home owners to burn property they cannot sell. Others simply walk away from houses they can’t pay the back taxes on, leaving empty properties vulnerable to vandals, squatters, and drug dealers. The fire department has such a foreboding backlog of arson cases that a consortium of insurance companies recently partnered with the attorney general to conduct independent investigations.

Detroit is also home to “Devil’s Night,” a weekend of arson and vandalism beginning on Halloween eve, which peaked in the 1980s with 800 fires in a single night. Thanks to community patrols (“Angel’s Night”) and, this year, a citywide curfew on unaccompanied adolescents and children under 18, “Devil’s Night” has slowly declined since then, with 169 fires in 2010 and 94 in 2011.

Last Halloween my friend Claire Nowak-Boyd and I participated in a community patrol, driving slowly through blighted neighborhoods in northwest Detroit with our flashers on. Passing a fire in progress in Brightmoor — sometimes known as “Blightmoor” — we saw a firefighter on a ladder silhouetted by smoke over a small single-family house. We drove down dozens of other streets in that neighborhood, where houses stand exposed and ruined, their walls marked with Xs, signaling utility shutoffs, and yards full of discarded mattresses and furniture. The city doesn’t collect trash from vacant lots.

In a Free Press article about the neighborhood, African-American residents recalled the area’s vibrancy in the eighties and its slow decline. The reporter spoke to Eddie Holmes, a 55-year-old woman who lives on Rochelle Street. Most of her neighbors left a couple years ago after a drive-by shooting at the drug house next door. Another drug addict moved into the house next door. She recalled having recently chased burglars from her porch. “Almost everyone is gone out here,” she said. “We feel abandoned and forgotten.”

Camping on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula this summer, I met a white retiree who grew up in the area. He could remember that in the 1930s when his father built their house at Schoolcraft and Greenfield — a neighborhood near Brightmoor — people thought he was crazy; it was so far on the city’s edge. Back then, the man said, the area was full of vacant lots being sold by builders. As a child he watched them fill with houses. That 70 years later the area should be full of vacant lots again is one of the unbearable ironies that characterize life in Detroit.

The mid-20th century explosion of industry that made Detroit a leader in home-ownership also made it a leader in redlining and lending discrimination. Recent immigrants and internal migrants — whether southern whites, Arabs, or Eastern Europeans — adopted racial hierarchies by which their status could be elevated at the expense of African-Americans. As inner-city neighborhoods integrated in the middle of the century, suburbs and townships that had carefully protected racial, ethnic, and religious profiles (often by restrictive deeds) grew around the city like an ever-replicating tumor, killing its host.

As of the 2010 census, only 18 percent of the metro region’s overall population lives in the city of Detroit. Only 2.8 percent of the region’s white population does. Every year since the 1950s, Detroit has lost citizens while the suburbs have grown. Over the last decade, the city lost over a quarter of its residents — the equivalent of a busload of Detroiters leaving every day — while Livingston, Macomb, and Oakland, three suburban counties, held steady or gained population. Detroit is currently more than 84 percent black, a figure that represents approximately 61 percent of the metro area’s total African-American population. The rest live in suburbs: large-scale African-American flight from the inner city began in the 1990s and has accelerated with the recent real estate crisis, which opened up housing options for black families in suburbs that discriminated against them in more prosperous times. One disturbing trend of the past decade has been for white parents in the integrating inner-ring suburbs to send their children to whiter, more affluent school districts farther from Detroit. Typically, the farther from the inner city, the richer the suburbs: West Bloomfield, 27.5 miles from downtown Detroit, is one of the 10 wealthiest towns in the United States.

For every abandoned business, store, school, or church in the city, a new one has been built in the suburbs. Only 38 percent of employed Detroiters work in the city. Many suburban business names refer to streets in Detroit, though their original locations closed years ago. Telway has a second and larger location in Auburn Hills, a prosperous east-side suburb to which Chrysler relocated its main plant decades ago. Huge shopping and strip malls, office parks, and satellite downtowns mean that many suburbanites, the children of early white flight, brag about having never been into the city, while others visit it once a year to see one of the museums or attend a sporting event or a festival.

Detroit holds only 14 percent of the region’s jobs. On any given day after a heavy snow, young African-American men go door to door, seeing if anyone will pay them to shovel walks. The unemployed third of the city’s population roughly corresponds to the third that doesn’t own a car. An estimated 36 percent of the city’s residents and over half of its children live below the poverty line. Over 47 percent of the city’s residents are functionally illiterate. The Detroit school system continues to lose teachers and close schools, while grade-fixing and social promotion — where failing students are passed to the next grade regardless of performance — is rampant. Parents are expected to buy toilet paper and hand sanitizer for their children’s classrooms, many of which contain between 40 and 50 students.

You’ve doubtless read stories about Detroit’s burgeoning art scene: the legions of young and generally white hipsters and artists renting cheap studios and lofts in former factories and downtown buildings. The presence of artists, entrepreneurs, and students is palpable in some of the neighborhoods near downtown and Wayne State University. A couple of blocks from the defunct train station, just west of downtown, sits a trendy barbeque restaurant called Slow’s where there’s often an hour-long wait to get a table. It’s run by an international-model-turned-Detroit-impresario named Phillip Cooley. That neighborhood is called Corktown, a sliver of a neighborhood, really, once Irish, and made up of rehabbed Victorian workman’s cottages. Last autumn, I wandered through the arsoned hulk of a house, across from the train station, which had been turned into an installation called Salvaged Landscape. Artist and University of Michigan professor Catie Newell used burnt lumber from the back of the house to build a sculpture. Rooms that partway withstood the blaze were filled with murals. The house still smelled of charred wood and urine. For the opening, the artists placed a beer keg out back as well as a table laden with pasta and thin crust pizza. Musicians played on an impromptu stage. “This used to be a drug house, filled with squatters,” explained Marianne Burrows, an acquaintance of mine who painted the murals. “So the exhibit is a way of providing neighborhood stabilization as well.”

A recent New York Times article lauded Detroit as a “Midwestern Tribeca” of socially aware folk; but off of its bustling main drag, Corktown is surrounded by Detroit’s burned-out industrial structures and houses, weedy lots, and subsidized housing. For every white entrepreneur in an inner-city neighborhood, a score of young, college-educated kids live in dense, hip suburbs like Royal Oak and Ferndale. The Detroit perceived by artists like Catie and Marianne — often from privileged, suburban backgrounds — is radically different from the city visible to EMS workers. I have doubts about the city’s oft-vaunted creative scene, which I was part of for much of the year: to what extent were we dancing to electro-pop while Detroit burned?

On a summer night, I drove around a particularly desolate stretch of the east side. Charred foundations outnumbered houses. Grasses grew waist-high around them. On Belvidere Street, a brightly colored convenience store came into view. It had recently been refurbished: freshly painted graffiti-like letters, colorful and stylized, proclaimed it the “NEW BORN PARTY STORE,” while the other wall boasted of “A MAN with a VISION …” The words reminded me of a speech Mayor Bing gave last September. Bing’s arrival came on the heels of the felonious ex-mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, and many look to him for new direction; a city official introducing Bing quoted a passage from Isaiah about the restoration of Jerusalem: “[A]nd they shall build houses and inhabit them; and they shall plant vineyards, and eat the fruit of them.” Restoring Detroit, however, is a formidable task. Bing announced the first stages of Detroit’s strategic plan to shrink services in neighborhoods that are too far-gone to recover mid-century population levels — but those neighborhoods are not entirely empty. I wondered about the optimist who had opened the New Born Party Store. It seemed like a symbol of the stubborn, creative resilience that somehow manages to thrive in Detroit’s harshest, most decimated corners.

One of the great open secrets of Detroit is its spoken-word scene, which is among the most vibrant in the nation. Earlier this spring, I went to the open mic at Nandi’s Knowledge Café in Highland Park. Highland Park is a microcosm of Detroit — a small island of a city surrounded by Detroit on every side — which resisted incorporation because of its massive wealth 100 years ago when its tax base included Henry Ford’s Model T factory. Then, it was full of beautiful wide-porched houses and known as the “city of trees”; verdant elms lined its avenues. In the 1940s, the Highland Park grade school included students of more than 38 nationalities. But in the 1950s, the Ford factory closed. Chrysler, which had also built a major plant there, moved operations to Auburn Hills in the early 1990s. White flight and disinvestment decimated the city, and in the meantime, Dutch elm disease wiped out Highland Park’s prided trees. Today its population is almost 96 percent African-American, 40 percent of whom live below the poverty line.

Nandi’s Knowledge Café is a local hub. On a Tuesday night, $5 will admit you to the basement where soul food is served in a low-lit, mirror-paneled room and some of Detroit’s most talented poets take the mic. As with many cultural spots in Detroit, when I went I attended one night, not only was I the only white person there, but I got the feeling that I was the only white person who had been there in a long time (the MC joked that if I was from the police or the DEA, I’d better fess up). The themes of the poems ranged from thwarted love (“I’m trying to be a King/But I’m still looking for my Coretta Scott”) to black media stereotypes and Obama. The most impressive performance was by a petite woman named Alfie, who looked about 25. Her hair was in tight pigtails, and she wore a pink T-shirt and acid-washed jeans. “I wrote this at work today, actually,” she announced, taking the mic. Alfie unfolded a crumpled piece of lined paper and launched into her poem:

I work at a Chrysler plan-
-tation…

She explained how her mother told her to get a career, not a job. But college was costing too much money. So at 22 she took the full-time plant gig in the suburbs where her high school diploma and 3.3 grade-point average “might as well be a GED.” She knows she’s wasting her mind: her 50-cent raise means she “made more than last year.” Running around the office in high-heeled boots, she said, doing what the white managers tell her, she feels it’s not so different from decades ago when she would have been “cooking their chicken” and making her own chitterlings. The refrain of the piece was that she should still be grateful when many friends and family don’t have jobs at all. In her prayers, she tries to hold fast to gratitude instead of dwelling on all the missed opportunities:

But I know it could be worse
I don’t mean to complain
So every night I thank Him
And He says, “You’re welcome … ”

As I left the open mic, I drove the long way around the residential block that surrounds Nandi’s. I made a left onto Cortland Street, full of once-lovely mid-century brick houses, the stoops of which now crumble into the weeds. My headlights illuminated the pale fur of a stray dog. Right in the middle of that block, a fire was engulfing one of the two-story houses. Flames flickered between yellow and orange in the night. I slowed my car down for a moment and watched the glow reflect on my windshield and hands. I contemplated dialing 911. But the house was pretty far gone, and the buildings on either side were both vacant. Highland Park’s emergency services are so overstretched that the state of Michigan recently seized control from the local government. So I sat there and watched it burn. Whether the continued presence of creativity, hope, and resilience amid such devastation seems a triumph or a tragedy varies second by second, block by block.

Started in 2005, Citi Pond is now in its seventh season. Originally the brainchild of Daniel A. Biederman, executive director of the Bryant Park Corporation (BPC) in the 1990s, the free skating rink was installed not for the pleasure of the park’s constituents but in order to drive traffic to the struggling pop-up holiday market that lines the park for 10 weeks from October to January. According to Biederman, “The business concept is this helps the market and the market helps this.” Because the private BPC, which manages the public park for the city, could not afford the $4 million price tag of installing a portable rink, they sought corporate sponsorship from Citibank, which continues to foot the annual bill in exchange for the right to advertise (heavily) within the park. Rebranded from “The Pond at Bryant Park,” to the more clever “Citi Pond at Bryant Park” in 2010 – this winter wonderland is a model for successful single sponsorship of public space.

The Citibank advertising is so ubiquitous, in fact, it almost recedes from view. The 17,000 square foot oblong rink is framed on four sides by 15-foot-tall banner advertisements for its sponsor. Held in place with elaborate aluminum rigging and framed by blinding banks of klieg lights, the banners don’t advertise Citibank’s services but instead shout friendly encouragements to get out on the ice. “Leave your boredom with your shoes,” reads one, “Skate in circles and unwind,” another. Even the Zamboni, which resurfaces the ice every few hours, carries a small “Citi Pond sponsored by Citibank” banner with the mantra, “If you can read this, you’re the perfect distance from work.” The design of the banners is sparse, a Citi Pond logo at top, large blue rounded sans serif copy below, and silhouetted figures skating against a white snowscape in the bottom third. It’s rather benign as far as advertisements go, and preferable to the loud billboards or non-themed ads imaginable if each space were sold instead to the highest bidder. The ads were designed by specialty development firm Upsilon Ventures, a hybrid marketing, event and production company responsible for the creation not just of Citi Pond, but the entire winter-themed venue including The Holiday Shops, and Celsius, the two-story pop-up restaurant at the rink’s edge.

Once swayed by the advertisements’ call to “Loosen your tie,” and “Tighten your skates,” skaters must queue up on the 40th Street side of the park to gain access to the ice. It is here that the whole endeavor starts to feel less like an outdoor adventure and more like a trip to the airport by way of a Midtown club. The entrance to the plastic and plexiglass structure that houses skate rental, bag storage and concession stands, is guarded by 2 hulking bodyguards and lined with retractable rope. Instead of red carpet, skaters stand in line atop low-pile, speckled, dark blue rugs. Admission is free thanks to Citibank’s sponsorship (unlike most rinks within city limits) but skate rental costs $14, and checking a bag adds an additional $7. As night falls, the structure glows blue from within, and giant white snowflakes are projected onto the carpeting inside and out.

The scene, once you’re safely inside, is strangely familiar. A mash-up of airport, ski lodge and roller rink comes to mind as the circular benches and banks of standard gray lockers come into view. This temporary tent-like construction is ostensibly set-up anew each season, but the furniture looks like its been here for years. The white painted wood benches are chipped, giving them the look of aged concrete, while the red vinyl bench pads are ripped and torn in many places. Rounded fiberglass archways with inset pink lights flank the snack bar and locker area, an oddly futuristic yet dated detail. The rental skates are gray and nondescript and it’s a little surprising Citibank missed this opportunity to brand them with at least a logo or some zippy copy – perhaps when not in use at Citi Pond they travel to some other locale for the off-season? In fact, the interior could benefit from more branding. What works so well surrounding the rink, is the unifying effect of Citibank’s omnipresent ads – the sweet slogans and simple graphics make the space feel cohesive, encompassing, and far from temporary. Inside, static logos play on mounted flat screens, but the mismatched furniture and unadorned walls emphasize the makeshift environs; the overall theme is momentarily lost.

Less crowded during morning and afternoon hours, the pond fills up in the evenings with couples, children, and teenagers. Stepping out onto the ice, lights bright and the jazz standards blaring, there’s a moment of exhilaration as your skates make first contact. Circling the rink in a mess of people who are mostly stumbling or holding onto the sideboards for dear life is more fun than it should be. While impossible to get up to high speeds, it’s still a good time – everyone is smiling, laughing, or shouting. Past the shining lights and the towering blue-lit tree on the eastern edge of the park, stand some of New York’s greatest buildings: The New York Public Library to the west, itself the pinnacle of Beaux-Arts design, Raymond Hood’s American Radiator Building clad in black brick and gold to the south, and to the north the graceful form of the W.R. Grace building.

Glittering backdrop aside, overall Citi Pond delivers an aesthetically pleasing, successfully branded experience. By embracing the single sponsor model in a temporary space, visual cacophony is avoided and a sense of place remains. The Project for Public Spaces points to the park’s good management, and its ability to “develop and implement innovative ideas to attract people during all seasons.” The creative approach of the BPC in making the Citi Pond experience a destination, coupled with its attractive programming provides a rare example of corporate sponsorship done right. As impermanent architecture becomes more prevalent in the city (via pop-up shops or other fleeting endeavors), and the economic climate forces many parks to fundraise for themselves, the template of this park’s success is a useful guide.

Last year Bryant Park was named one of the 10 best “Great Public Spaces” in the nation by the American Planning Association, and after skating around its fake yet enchanting “pond” I’d have to agree. With a deft mix of public and private partnership, tasteful sponsorship, and one frozen surface, Citi Pond succeeds in unique placemaking. Sure, skating here is not the same simple pleasure we might remember from childhood, but a grown-up New York version of the same – keep that in mind and you won’t be disappointed. As the ad says, “A story with a triple axel is one worth telling.”

Flavaboom is exemplary of the new typology. Its walls and floors are starkly white with brightly colored, bulbous furniture that resemble Mochi, the colorful Japanese jelly-like rice paste. The hyper-modern stores, by using bright lights and smooth, clean, plastic-like white materials with colorful accents in soft, plush furniture, simulate the experience of being in a giant bowl of yogurt.  Reyner Banham wrote of detached motifs and patterns on ice cream vans which paralleled the sprinkles and stars of the emerging ice cream trends of 70’s London.  A similar condition exists in the contemporary Yogurt Vernacular.  The pristine yogurt-like ivory glitz serves as a base for the “toppings”, smears of color, usually chairs, benches, tables, and graphics.  Why is it that frozen yogurt establishments have spawned a particular form of hi-tech bubblegum modernism, the Mochi-Moderne phase of the Yogurt Vernacular?

Frozen yogurt shops are the most “Modernist” buildings being built in 2011.  Self-serve is an update of the Modernist tradition of efficiency, technological innovation, and mechanization.  At flavaboom, for instance, brightly colored cartoon-like signs guide you through the experience, or more accurately, the process of the building. You start by getting a hygienic paper cup, and filling it with your choice of yogurt.  Workers are available to help you sample the different flavors.  Once you have your base, it is off to the topping bar.  Spatially, these are arranged in a more or less linear fashion, to speed the process and eliminate unnecessary movement. Toppings are dusted and drizzled, and then up next is the weigh in.  Payment is handed over based on weight.  This process cuts down on unnecessary workers leaving an employee to act as a personal assistant, should the need arise.  The self-serve process pares the need for food delivery infrastructure, and thus the building, down to a minimum.

Gropius and the Bauhaus, influencing this design, would herald it as perfectly “modern”.  It is efficient, but also clean.  Surfaces are smooth, unadorned, and easily cleaned.  The mechanized delivery system at self-serve Yogurt shops is integrated into the building and efficiently serves a healthy, mass-produced food product.

It is of course, updated to more accurately suit the “zeitgeist”.  The colorful LED screens above the yogurt machines, pulsing in synch with the techno-pop, truly embody the “Modernist” spirit. One cannot pretend, as Michael Meredith jokes that “time stopped in 1903 in Vienna”.  The music is extremely trendy, but it fits and reminds me of Uniqlo, whose seminal work, the Heattech Tunnel® at their global flagship on 5^th Ave., employs the same led-fueled sensorial overload with animated LED screens and techno (though the tunnel cranks it up a notch with mirrors and high-tech underwear packaged in reflective metallic plastic bags).

The absurd interior design of these techno-fetishized escapes echoes self-serve yogurt’s technologically and politically progressive cultural construct.  The colored LED screens, lights, and furniture tell us a story about progress. The stores are not only progressive in their delivery methodology, but the architecture is also symbolic.  Ice cream stores tend to have striped awnings and nostalgic elements drawn from the days of the neighborhood ice cream shoppe.  This brings us back to the days of hand-churning milk from the farm into a sinfully sweet creamy blob of milk fat.  In today’s high-tech, high speed, but low-fat consumer sphere, there is no space for milk fat or the dumpy aesthetics of the small town ice cream parlour.  This is frozen yogurt; it is healthy, hip, and chic.  It is not the food of little kids or clowns; it is for clubbers and city-dwellers — the young, the fashionable.

This marketing strategy is apparent in the names of the shops. 16 Handles is named after the movie 16 candles, an overt pop reference that aims at two demographics.  The first is 30-something’s who grew up watching 16 Candles.  The second is the actual teens.  Both demographics are concerned with being healthy, and these are the users of the spaces.  Snog, a London-based yogurt chain, falls short in the Modernist test, as it is an old-fashioned walk up counter, but its name and its architecture is stunningly techno-funhouse-like.  It contains the same elements as flavaboom, LED pixels, white walls, and brightly colored “mochi” furniture.  Snog, a British slang, means to make out, so we immediately see who is being marketed to. It is again the young, hip urban city-dweller.

Techno is the music which embodies this spirit; it is colorful and fun with glittery synths mirroring the sparkly high tech interior. The remixes played over the speakers in the ceiling allude to the personalized yogurt mash-ups which are being constructed below.  The individualization of the yogurt-building process is thoroughly expressed in the absurd experience of these shops.  Young people are drawn to the experience because it is everything they crave: fast, healthy, and “hip”.  The architecture is part of this branding. I can’t get enough of it.