Issue 13
DATE
STORY TYPE
AUTHOR
12
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
10.07.2024
What It Means—and What It’s Worth—to Be “Light”
by Julie Lasky
12
PERSPECTIVE
09.23.2024
Redefining “Iconic” Architecture and Ideals
by Sophie Lovell
12
PERSPECTIVE
09.09.2024
Surrendering to What Is
by Marianne Krogh
11
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
08.26.2024
Sometimes, Democratic Design Doesn’t “Look” Like Anything
by Zach Mortice
11
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
08.19.2024
What Does Your Home Say About You?
by Shane Reiner-Roth
11
BOOK REVIEW
08.12.2024
Is Building Better Cities a Dream Within Reach?
by Michael Webb
11
PEOPLE
08.05.2024
The Value of Unbuilt Buildings
by George Kafka
11
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
07.29.2024
Future-Proofing a Home Where Water Is a Focus and a Thread
by Alexandra Lange
11
BOOK REVIEW
07.22.2024
Modernist Town, U.S.A.
by Ian Volner
11
PEOPLE
07.15.2024
Buildings That Grow from a Place
by Anthony Paletta
10
URBANISM
06.24.2024
What We Lose When a Historic Building Is Demolished
by Owen Hatherley
10
PERSPECTIVE
06.17.2024
We Need More Than Fewer, Better Things
by Deb Chachra
10
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
06.03.2024
An Ode to Garages
by Charlie Weak
10
PERSPECTIVE
05.28.2024
In Search of Domestic Kintsugi
by Edwin Heathcote
10
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
05.13.2024
The Perils of the Landscapes We Make
by Karrie Jacobs
10
PERSPECTIVE
05.06.2024
Using Simple Tools as a Radical Act of Independence
by Jarrett Fuller
9
PERSPECTIVE
04.29.2024
Why Can’t I Just Go Home?
by Eva Hagberg
9
PEOPLE
04.22.2024
Why Did Our Homes Stop Evolving?
by George Kafka
9
ROUNDTABLE
04.08.2024
Spaces Where the Body Is a Vital Force
by Tiffany Jow
9
BOOK REVIEW
04.01.2024
Tracing the Agency of Women as Users and Experts of Architecture
by Mimi Zeiger
9
PERSPECTIVE
03.25.2024
Are You Sitting in a Non-Place?
by Mzwakhe Ndlovu
9
ROUNDTABLE
03.11.2024
At Home, Connecting in Place
by Marianela D’Aprile
9
PEOPLE
03.04.2024
VALIE EXPORT’s Tactical Urbanism
by Alissa Walker
8
PERSPECTIVE
02.26.2024
What the “Whole Earth Catalog” Taught Me About Building Utopias
by Anjulie Rao
8
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
02.19.2024
How a Run-Down District in London Became a Model for Neighborhood Revitalization
by Ellen Peirson
8
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
02.12.2024
In Brooklyn, Housing That Defies the Status Quo
by Gideon Fink Shapiro
8
PERSPECTIVE
02.05.2024
That “Net-Zero” Home Is Probably Living a Lie
by Fred A. Bernstein
8
PERSPECTIVE
01.22.2024
The Virtue of Corporate Architecture Firms
by Kate Wagner
8
PERSPECTIVE
01.16.2024
How Infrastructure Shapes Us
by Deb Chachra
8
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
01.08.2024
The Defiance of Desire Lines
by Jim Stephenson
7
PEOPLE
12.18.2023
This House Is Related to You and to Your Nonhuman Relatives
by Sebastián López Cardozo
7
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
12.11.2023
What’s the Point of the Plus Pool?
by Ian Volner
7
BOOK REVIEW
12.04.2023
The Extraordinary Link Between Aerobics and Architecture
by Jarrett Fuller
7
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
11.27.2023
Architecture That Promotes Healing and Fortifies Us for Action
by Kathryn O’Rourke
7
PEOPLE
11.06.2023
How to Design for Experience
by Diana Budds
7
PEOPLE
10.30.2023
The Meaty Objects at Marta
by Jonathan Griffin
6
OBJECTS
10.23.2023
How Oliver Grabes Led Braun Back to Its Roots
by Marianela D’Aprile
6
URBANISM
10.16.2023
Can Adaptive Reuse Fuel Equitable Revitalization?
by Clayton Page Aldern
6
PERSPECTIVE
10.09.2023
What’s the Point of a Tiny Home?
by Mimi Zeiger
6
OBJECTS
10.02.2023
A Book Where Torn-Paper Blobs Convey Big Ideas
by Julie Lasky
6
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
09.24.2023
The Architecture of Doing Nothing
by Edwin Heathcote
6
BOOK REVIEW
09.18.2023
What the “Liebes Look” Says About Dorothy Liebes
by Debika Ray
6
PEOPLE
09.11.2023
Roy McMakin’s Overpowering Simplicity
by Eva Hagberg
6
OBJECTS
09.05.2023
Minimalism’s Specific Objecthood, Interpreted by Designers of Today
by Glenn Adamson
5
ROUNDTABLE
08.28.2023
How Joan Jonas and Eiko Otake Navigate Transition
by Siobhan Burke
5
OBJECTS
08.21.2023
The Future-Proofing Work of Design-Brand Archivists
by Adrian Madlener
5
URBANISM
08.14.2023
Can a Church Solve Canada’s Housing Crisis?
by Alex Bozikovic
5
PEOPLE
08.07.2023
In Search of Healing, Helen Cammock Confronts the Past
by Jesse Dorris
5
URBANISM
07.31.2023
What Dead Malls, Office Parks, and Big-Box Stores Can Do for Housing
by Ian Volner
5
PERSPECTIVE
07.24.2023
A Righteous Way to Solve “Wicked” Problems
by Susan Yelavich
5
OBJECTS
07.17.2023
Making a Mess, with a Higher Purpose
by Andrew Russeth
5
ROUNDTABLE
07.10.2023
How to Emerge from a Starchitect’s Shadow
by Cynthia Rosenfeld
4
PEOPLE
06.26.2023
There Is No One-Size-Fits-All in Architecture
by Marianela D’Aprile
4
PEOPLE
06.19.2023
How Time Shapes Amin Taha’s Unconventionally Handsome Buildings
by George Kafka
4
PEOPLE
06.12.2023
Seeing and Being Seen in JEB’s Radical Archive of Lesbian Photography
by Svetlana Kitto
4
PERSPECTIVE
06.05.2023
In Built Environments, Planting Where It Matters Most
by Karrie Jacobs
3
PERSPECTIVE
05.30.2023
On the Home Front, a Latine Aesthetic’s Ordinary Exuberance
by Anjulie Rao
3
PERSPECTIVE
05.21.2023
For a Selfie (and Enlightenment), Make a Pilgrimage to Bridge No. 3
by Alexandra Lange
3
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
05.08.2023
The Building Materials of the Future Might Be Growing in Your Backyard
by Marianna Janowicz
3
BOOK REVIEW
05.01.2023
Moving Beyond the “Fetishisation of the Forest”
by Edwin Heathcote
2
ROUNDTABLE
04.24.2023
Is Craft Still Synonymous with the Hand?
by Tiffany Jow
2
PEOPLE
04.17.2023
A Historian Debunks Myths About Lacemaking, On LaceTok and IRL
by Julie Lasky
2
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
04.10.2023
How AI Helps Architects Design, and Refine, Their Buildings
by Ian Volner
2
PEOPLE
04.03.2023
Merging Computer and Loom, a Septuagenarian Artist Weaves Her View of the World
by Francesca Perry
1
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
03.27.2023
Words That Impede Architecture, According to Reinier de Graaf
by Osman Can Yerebakan
1
PEOPLE
03.20.2023
Painting With Plaster, Monica Curiel Finds a Release
by Andrew Russeth
1
PERSPECTIVE
03.13.2023
Rules and Roles in Life, Love, and Architecture
by Eva Hagberg
1
Roundtable
03.06.2023
A Design Movement That Pushes Beyond Architecture’s Limitations
by Tiffany Jow
0
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
02.07.2023
To Improve the Future of Public Housing, This Architecture Firm Looks to the Past
by Ian Volner
0
OBJECTS
02.07.2023
The Radical Potential of “Prime Objects”
by Glenn Adamson
0
PEOPLE
02.20.2023
Xiyadie’s Queer Cosmos
by Xin Wang
0
PEOPLE
02.13.2023
How Michael J. Love’s Subversive Tap Dancing Steps Forward
by Jesse Dorris
0
SHOW AND TELL
02.07.2023
Finding Healing and Transformation Through Good Black Art
by Folasade Ologundudu
0
BOOK REVIEW
02.13.2023
How Stephen Burks “Future-Proofs” Craft
by Francesca Perry
0
ROUNDTABLE
02.27.2023
Making Use of End Users’ Indispensable Wisdom
by Tiffany Jow
0
PEOPLE
02.07.2023
The New Lessons Architect Steven Harris Learns from Driving Old Porsches
by Jonathan Schultz
0
PERSPECTIVE
02.07.2023
The Day Architecture Stopped
by Kate Wagner
0
OBJECTS
02.07.2023
The Overlooked Potential of Everyday Objects
by Adrian Madlener
0
ROUNDTABLE
02.07.2023
A Conversation About Generalists, Velocity, and the Source of Innovation
by Tiffany Jow
0
OBJECTS
02.07.2023
Using a Fungi-Infused Paste, Blast Studio Turns Trash Into Treasure
by Natalia Rachlin
Untapped is published by the design company Henrybuilt.
Untapped is published by the design company Henrybuilt.
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
10.07.2024
What It Means—and What It’s Worth—to Be “Light”

Reflections on a question that has long held allure for countless designers, scientists, and thinkers.

Inside the Villa del Grumello at the Lake Como Design Festival with three large windows and modern furniture on display
Objects installed at Villa del Grumello during the recent Lake Como Design Festival. (Photo: Nicolò Panzeri)


“Send us bright one, light one, Horhorn, quickening and wombfruit.” This incantation, at the beginning of the “Oxen of the Sun” chapter in James Joyce’s Ulysses, describes babies being born at a Dublin maternity hospital on a June day in 1904. In epic terms, the sentence relates to an island in Homer’s Odyssey populated by cattle that are the special horned creatures of the sun god, Helios. In Biblical terms, it enacts the process of words made flesh. The brightness of holy incandescence at the chant’s beginning is transformed into human life by the end. Light is made material before our eyes.

English is unusual in offering the same word, light, to refer to both illumination and a slightness of weight. In French, the concepts have their own, distinct words: lumière and légèreté. In Italian, they’re luce and leggerezza; in German, licht and leichtigkeit. Yet 17 years before Ulysses was published, Einstein demonstrated that the bright stuff that pours from the heavens has substance, that light is both a wave and a particle, a flash and a thing. In their own ways, Einstein and Joyce ushered in a modern era that was fixated on the magical conjuring, dislocation, and evaporation of matter. English had it right when it extended “light” across states of being.

We’re still in that era in every facet of culture, not least design. In a recent stroke of synchronicity, lightness was the theme of both the 49th Museum of Modern Art R&D Salon, held in New York City this past June, and of the sixth Lake Como Design Festival, hosted in Italy last month. True to the diffuse subject, both events took a large part of their inspiration not from a designer or architect, but from Italo Calvino, the Italian postmodern novelist and critic.

In his “Six Memos for the Next Millennium,” a Harvard lecture series that Calvino didn’t live long enough to complete, much less deliver (he died of a cerebral hemorrhage in 1985, at the age of 61), he proposed half a dozen literary values he believed would resonate powerfully in the future. The first was lightness, a quality that allowed the writer’s imagination to skitter among observations, sensations, and the textual creations of others, weaving together a reality that was no less legitimate than the grounded discoveries of science. (After all, what is solid matter but an illusion? Even the ancient Greek philosopher Democritus understood that the hardest, heaviest substances were composed of atoms flying around in space.)

There is slipperiness in the dichotomy of lightness and weight, Calvino stressed, nodding to Milan Kundera’s cult novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being, which had been published the year before he passed. What is weighty is not just a drag, but also profound and durable. What is light is not just magical, but also flippant and evanescent. And these polarities are not just unstable on their own terms, but illuminate and complicate each other.

“If I had to choose an auspicious sign for the approach of the new millennium,” Calvino wrote, “I would choose this: the sudden nimble leap of the poet/philosopher who lifts himself against the weight of the world, proving that its heaviness contains the secret of lightness, while what many believe to be the life force of the times—loud and aggressive, roaring and rumbling—belongs to the realm of death, like the graveyard of automobiles.”

Now that we are squarely in the millennium that Calvino could only squint at, subjected to the rigid dogmas of our political climate, the restless metaphors of lightness and weight are hardly comforting for those who cannot tolerate ambiguity. This may be why the question of what it means—and what it’s worth—to be “light” is so alluring to designers, scientists, and thinkers unwilling to accept the complacency of so-called progress.

Lightness is “the image of grace, agility, luminosity, the essence of buoyant clouds and billowing silks,” declared the text introduction to MoMA R&D Salon 49, part of an IRL event series organized and hosted by Paola Antonelli, the museum’s longtime senior design curator. “It is good for the spirit and good for the environment. In theory, the lighter an object is, the less energy it consumes during its existence and the lighter its impact is. Nonetheless”—and here comes the always-lurking paradox—“even apparently immaterial things carry a burden, at times a heavy one. The internet’s illusion of weightlessness—human activities, objects, and interactions dissolving into bits and traveling through the air—crashes when confronted by the heavy ecological footprint necessary to sustain its infrastructure.”

What followed at the Salon was a stream of not just dialectical contradictions but violent reversals: How Kanye West clawed away huge portions of his Malibu beach house built by the minimalist master Tadao Ando to reach some deranged concept of architectural purity. How an Apple advertisement dramatized the crushing of tools and technologies representing every facet of analog culture to create the chilly sliver of the company’s new iPad. How tents, the portable shelters of nomads, those paragons of resourceful living in harmony with the earth, have devolved into symbols of homelessness and urban shame. How fleshiness, once a signifier of prosperity, flipped into a malign feature that helped justify the enslavement of African women and remains a stigma in the age of Ozempic.

A media studies professor, a philosopher of Buddhism, an engineer working with origami, an aerospace architect, and others rotated the concept of lightness in culture like a gem held up to a lamp among shadows. Their presentations sparkled with complexity and sometimes even optimism.

Four thousand miles away and less than three months later, the Lake Como Design Festival described its theme of lightness as “a constant need over time that has always pushed us toward the illusion that we can ignore the force of gravity and get closer to the sky.” This was not presented as a bad thing. Today, lightness means “finding the right balance between form, material, and movement,” the festival literature proclaimed. Yet here, too, lightness, by its unstable nature, was all over the map.

Organized by the nonprofit cultural organization Wonderlake Como, the festival was headquartered in a 16-acre hillside park, on which sat a 17th-century villa and a number of outbuildings: tool sheds, greenhouses, a tiny chapel. All but the recently renovated Villa del Grumello were in poetic states of semi-moldering, casting a Sleeping Beauty spell on works by international designers and artists—delicate mobiles and woven tapestries, architectural models made of melted wax, rippling glass that engineered the fluid patterns of reflected beams—objects that pushed the elastic semantics of their theme, so that lightness was also interpreted as levity. And nothing made visitors more conscious of lightness than the tug of gravity exerted on their bodies as they climbed the Chilometro della Conoscenza, the lush, steep path between sites.

In repurposed civic and religious buildings closer to the city center, an antique gravitas made the exhibited objects seem more ethereal. At San Pietro in Atrio, a church dating from the 12th century, artists’ prints representing ideas of buoyancy and flight were displayed along with their engraved plates, showing how material had been scratched away to produce legible tracks of the imagination.

Writing about this show, called “Lightness on Paper,” the critic Maria Cristina Didero quoted Calvino’s belief that lightness “is related to precision and definition, not to the hazy and haphazard.” This, too, seemed paradoxical considering all that is wavering and protean about lightness and its metaphors. But Calvino immediately cut through the contradiction by echoing a line by the French poet and philosopher Paul Valéry: “One must be light like the bird, not like the feather.”

The complex anatomical and conceptual forces that propel us to defy gravity and “get closer to the sky” are different from aimless, thoughtless propulsion. Design, as has often been said, is intention. It has contours. It is controlled by instincts that lead in the opposite direction from chaos. In these troubled times, the feeling that dark matters are relentlessly dragging us toward a collective abyss can be conquered, today’s maestros of lightness tell us, so long as we resolutely aim for something higher.