MOCA! New York Museum of Chinese in America

Museum of Chinese in America's new home at 215 Centre Street in New York's Chinatown. Photo credit: Pentagram.

I like the new identity program of New York Museum of Chinese in America: MOCA.
It is designed by Pentagram with this Project Team: Michael Bierut, partner-in-charge and designer; Yve Ludwig, designer (identity and signage); Rion Byrd-Gumus, designer (signage).

NEW MUSEUM BUILDING. During the past year, MOCA celebrated its first anniversary in its new home designed by the architect Maya Lin. She's done remarkable things from sculpture to architecture to landscape design. This post however is about Pentagram's identity work, though we may need some background about the museum itself.

WHAT IS MOCA. I quote from Pentagram's web pres:
- Founded in 1980 as a project to commemorate the history of New York’s Chinatown, the museum has grown over the years and is now recognized as an important national institution. In 2009 the museum relocated to a space at 215 Centre Street, a 12,000 square-foot former industrial machine repair shop on the border of Chinatown and Soho. After many years at 70 Mulberry Street, a location it shared with other community groups (and where it still maintains a Collections and Research Center), the move to the new space marked the institution’s growing confidence and optimism.

NEW IDENTITY. Here is how the identity program is presented:
- Pentagram’s Michael Bierut and Yve Ludwig designed an elegant new identity for MOCA that takes its cues from Lin’s architecture. The square logos—one the museum’s full name, the other the acronym—work in combination with their typical “chop” in Chinese characters, which the designers also modified. The word “Chinese” (or, in the acronym version, the letter C) is marked with a color shift to emphasize the museum’s focus. The same square motif recurs in other layout elements and the signage. Like the space itself, the identity and graphics avoid any overt references to the clichés of Chinese or Asian culture. Instead, the identity is meant to be a neutral frame, with the subject matter of the museum’s collections and exhibitions providing the specific and authentic content. The font Verlag is used throughout.

http://pentagram.com/en/new/2011/02/new-work-museum-of-chinese-in.php

Reading Eats and Reads...

READING EATS. Inspired by Italian columnist Giacomo Papi, Ingrid D. Rowland in the NYR blog (NYR=NEW YORK REVIEW of Books) reflects on how contemporary society has been revealed once and for all in the way we eat and our reading eats. "The mouth has become the most important organ..." says Giacomo Papi. "...Because eating is the only sensory, and hence aesthetic, experience that is entirely fulfilled in consumption. By destroying the work of art."

hmmm, a due warning before Xmas?
To recall that before Christmas is making rather than purely consumption time I have put in a picture of Norwegian flatbread baking. However, this could be a vanishing craft... (own photo).

BACK to the columnist: As in Italy and elsewhere, reading eats are changing in America, reflects Ingrid Rowland:
- "No one could have imagined that polar bears or the countryside would ever end when my family arrived in Corona del Mar, California, in the mid-1960s. The prevailing fantasy of those years, in that idyllic place, depended in equal measure on Walt Disney and Thor Heyerdahl’s Kon-Tiki; apartments and bars bore names like Outrigger or Aloha Moku, and no one’s patio was complete without a series of flaming tiki torches to lend evening parties the allure of a luau. Since then, however, the collective imagination has turned Corona del Mar into an outpost of Tuscany; the cut of meat that used to be known as a “T-bone steak” is now a “Tuscan Angus"..."

ON READS. - "What would Machiavelli or Borges make of the fact that books, at least in the US, seem to be going the way of the countryside, butterflies, and polar bears? Asks Ingrid. "For more and more publishers no longer advertise “books”; they advertise, with hammering insistence, “reads”—and reads, abetted by the very brevity of that Anglo-Saxon syllable, are acts of consumption as voracious as the meta-culinary gobble that has turned dinner into an analytical ordeal for Giacomo Papi. A read, of course, can be consummated on a Kindle, on a tablet, or on a computer, as well as between the pages of a book—perhaps that is the point of emphasizing the sale of reads rather than evoking that archaic form in which texts have so long been embodied."

OLD WORLD ACTS. "In one respect, at least, the Italians still live in the Old World," Ingrid remarks. - "An Italian lettura is not a “read” but a “reading,” a word that, apart from its long history of liturgical use among the Peoples of the Book, suggests an experience through time—like its English cognate, lecture. A lettura is a feast on slow food, an act that still retains a hint of ceremony..."

Maybe some of us Norwegians appreciate this as well when making flatbread or special gift readings such as handwritten cards for Christmas. We make it into an annual passage ceremony. Though we tend to save time by putting a few handwritten words on the cards or on preprinted letters that are put into envelopes with pictures and colourful old postcards. Any way, it needs to go quickly by slow post. Mass wired letters won't do the same job since they are less able to become family treasure readings.