Collaboration and individuality

This is a Cartoon of a skyscraper, published in Life's magazine’s “Real Estate Number” of March, 1909.The full-page cartoon by A.B. Walker shows conventional houses stacked on an open skyscraper frame. Its caption reads, “‘Buy a cozy cottage in our steel constructed choice lots, less than a mile above Broadway. Only ten minutes by elevator. All the comforts of the country with none of its disadvantages.’ – Celestial Real Estate Company”

R. Koolhaas extensively analyzed this cartoon in his seminal book, Delirious New York (Oxford, 1978, pp.69-70)'Each of the 84 stories is treated as “virgin site” - each site reflects a range of different social aspirations as if all the other did not exist The lack of program holding the whole structure together therefore allows multiple
activities / futures = reduction in predictability = inability to ‘plot’ culture

This cartoon reminded me of our project. It is like Phi books -we worked together with Eleanor, we produced a common project, like the scyscraper, and then we wrote papers expressing our different interpretations on the project as a paradigm of joining their individual practices and ending up with a common result that celebrates collaboration and individuality.

Ourselves, as personalities, but also our professional training (me as a designer and Eleanor as computer artist) often brought us in front of different perceptions and ways of doing things. I think that I am looking at the project as a design product, thinking of how it can be packaged, promoted, structured to be functional and easily understood by the audience while Eleanor considers it more of an artistic practice.