Good morning.

This week, we sit down with Beatrice Galilee to discuss her soon-to-debut architecture conference, The World Around; explore the Japanese art of mud-ball making, a.k.a. dorodango; sign up for Dr. Alejandro Junger’s 21-day Clean program; talk psychoacoustics with Susan Rogers, director of the Berklee Music Perception and Cognition Laboratory; and sniff patchouli with perfumer Jean-Marc Chaillan.

Beatrice Galilee, curator, writer, and the former associate curator of architecture and design at the Metropolitan Museum of Art—where she spearheaded the annual symposium, A Year of Architecture in a Day—tells us about her latest venture, The World Around, a global architecture forum launching Jan. 25 with a conference at the Times Center in New York City.
 
When did the idea for The World Around begin?

  What I found, when I was doing the conference at the Met, was that there was this huge audience and engagement for contemporary architecture. It wasn’t just architects, it wasn’t just students; it became a cultural event for the city. That was really inspiring and exciting to witness: that architecture was forming this role and a place, a topic around which people could convene, relate to, be excited about, and understand. Situating architecture in the realms of something urgent and important within a museum context is really, really powerful. 

The World Around is about taking that concept and rolling it out beyond New York. Innovation is not confined to the Western world or major cities, and the world is so interconnected. Our hope is that we will be championing different voices in architecture and, in a way, pushing them into mainstream discourse.

Hosting the event every January makes for an apt moment to take stock of the various conversations and developments of each year. Looking back, what resonated with you most in 2019?

  For the first theme for The World Around, we’re calling it “Reconnecting with the World Around.” A lot of the themes over the past year—from Paola Antonelli’s Milan Triennale, “Broken Nature,” to the work of Japanese architect Junya Ishigami—have been about forging a reconnection with our environment, and more caring, joyful encounters with nature. In a way, it’s much more philosophical, very much about understanding global movements and our impact on the planet. That’s been at the forefront of many cultural and political conversations at large: There was almost no way to disconnect the practice of design and architecture in the last year from concerns about the climate crisis and activism in relation to taking better care of the planet, being more conscious about materials, and being more thoughtful about the impact that architecture and design have. I would say that goes beyond a theme—it’s more of the atmosphere we’re in.

Another big focus for our first event is looking at data and identity. As we start to understand the imprint that our lives have, and the value of the data that we provide these global tech corporations, there’s a need for a moment to take stock and ask: Where is all that going? Data is largely regarded as the oil rush of the 21st century, the most valuable commodity that we have. It’s the thing that greases the wheel of all tech companies. We leave a trace of data that someone buys and sells, and has the opportunity to sell to me, based on a history of what I’ve clicked on.

Architecture comes down to power structures, physical or otherwise, and it seems pop culture is having a bit of a preoccupation with utopias and dystopias. What do you make of that?

  There was a time when the future was kind of utopian—the idea of the future was exciting and invigorating to think: Who’s the architect of the future? And how are we going to live in the future? But now, truly, it just fills me with dread. I feel like the idea of the future has a totally different atmosphere now. We’ve kind of lost the opportunity to have agency over our future because of what has happened to the planet. I do feel like the utopia/dystopia conversation is almost something of the past, whereas I am more interested in tomorrow—not the far future, but rather, what’s happening today, and what we can do about it. I do feel like it’s a slight sense of foreboding. Our effort is to try and change the conversation and move it a degree into this direction, and try and change the level of hope or interaction we have with our future.

(Courtesy Laurence King Publishing. Photo: Buck the Cubicle)

Mudslinging gets a bad rap. But for artist and author Bruce Gardner, an Albuquerque, New Mexico, native, the natural and abundant earthen material is not just a part of the local landscape; it’s his primary palette for a calming, meditative practice called hikaru dorodango—the Japanese craft of making beautiful spheres from, why yes, mud. While it may sound deceivingly simple, Gardner, who first learned of the art form in 2002, after reading an essay by writer William Gibson in Tate Etc. magazine, details the range of the surprisingly complex and challenging practice in his new book, Dorodango: The Japanese Art of Making Mud Balls (Laurence King). “I am struck by how these objects, created from such a humble material, are the near-perfect expression of process refinement. The process itself is art,” Gardner writes, noting that one of the most compelling aspects begins with sourcing, shoveling, and preparing the dirt from the local desert terroir. “The act of creating a dorodango irrevocably completes the transition; dirt is no longer ‘dirty’—it is an art medium.” 

Browsing his prodigious collection of dorodango—shelves upon shelves of bocce ball-sized spheres of hardened earth in a range of finishes and colors, from a polished concrete gray to a richly textured, pebbled terra cotta—it’s hard to deny the intrigue and intricacies of such a tactile, solitary activity, each round mass representing an orb of time. As Gardner puts it, dorodango “changes one’s perspective of dirt. Just learning of the art form is enough to bring about the conversation: ‘If this is true, what else have I overlooked?’”

Before entering academia, Susan Rogers, director of the Berklee Music Perception and Cognition Laboratory, worked as a producer and sound engineer with artists ranging from Prince to David Byrne. Here, the Ph.D. pro discusses the science of how musicians listen.

  “Psychoacoustics is a branch on the tree of psychometrics, which measures our ability to encode differences in our sensory modalities. So, for example, to what extent can we recognize that two different flavors are different on our tongues, feel that two fabrics have different textures, or recognize that two loud noises make different types of sounds? Obviously, we can recognize that silk and denim are different, but is silk different from sateen? Psychoacoustics looks at the basic processing of sound, from the ear all the way up to the cortex of the brain.

  This is a running theme in all the classes I teach: Musicians and non-musicians do not process music in the same way. Musicians are better able than the average population to more rapidly—and to a greater extent—perform psychoacoustic tasks, such as recognizing the difference between two sounds, responding to them and categorizing them. It’s also well-established that musical training in childhood turns people into a kind of auditory athlete.

Musicians don’t have better hearing any more than a painter has better vision than the average person to see things. But what the painter is able to see is the relationship among the various colors. I have a friend who’s a professional painter and sculptor, for example, and he can look at a dark green pigment and, just from experience, know how much black is in it, how much yellow is in it, and how much blue is in it. All I see, as a layman, is just dark green.

  Musical training develops the auditory path in such a way that people who are trained musicians can recognize and articulate the subtle differences between different sounds. Folks who work with sound professionally have sensory modalities as well as brain circuits that are hyper-charged to perform these functions. These circuits, running from the auditory path of the inner ear all the way up to the brain, are fatter and thicker and a little bit more specialized and differentiated, such that they are able to process all kinds of sounds—not just musical sounds, but speech sounds and environmental sounds—more efficiently.

  Is musical talent born or is it made? This question has been studied, and the general answer is, it’s pretty much made. There are differences among people. To be a great musician is like being a great scientist: It helps to be pretty bright, and to have a pretty high I.Q., the abilities to focus and practice, and a capacity for delayed gratification. For the most part, though, it’s the amount of practice that turns someone into a musician.”

The scent of patchouli may be redolent of head shops and college dorm rooms, canonized as the pothead’s perennial choice of potpourri in American pop culture. Which makes it all the more surprising that the musky, earthy note should be the all-time favorite of renowned perfumer Jean-Marc Chaillan, who knows his way around a fragrance. Raised in Grasse, France—the perfume capital of the world—he’s also the son of legendary perfumer Raymond Chaillan, who made Yves Saint Laurent’s Opium, and the apple hasn’t fallen far from the tree. “Patchouli is the most sexy, sweet, and supernatural product I know,” says Jean-Marc, for whom the scent holds the power of Proust’s madeleine, hard-wired into a formative childhood memory that has continued to color his work.

“I love using it; it’s a game changer in any fragrance design. It has so much character that no matter how much of it you use, it will make an impact,” he says, likening its staple versatility to a primary color among a painter’s palette. While there are multiple variations, naturals, and fractions of patchouli to use, Jean-Marc notes, “It has always remained elemental. It’s part earth, air, water, and fire. For me, it’s a composition of all the earth’s elements: mystical, mesmerizing, and completely intoxicating.”

Until next week...