Report on The Clock

How even the NYTimes was allowed to take this photo, I have no idea.

Well, today and tomorrow from 8AM to 10PM will be your last chance to see Christian Marclay's The Clock at Lincoln Center. If you did see it already, you may have spotted me on the line welcoming visitors and chatting with them. With the exception of our regular Crazies who showed up to harass us at all the most inopportune moments and the incident with the fire alarm going off, I'll have to say I had a ton of fun doing it. I got to speak with so many interesting and really nice people (and some of them cute, too). The question I probably answered a thousand times: "What's the best time to come to avoid the line?" The answer was "earlier is always better." The earlier in the day you can get there, the shorter the line will be. For the weekdays, 7:00 to 7:30AM probably.

Despite the fact that I clearly love coming up with puns and wordplay to title my posts, all the ones I might have for this post are understandably corny, clichéed, nauseating, or all of the above. So this is a mere "report."

For anyone who doesn't know about the piece, it took Marclay and his six assistants three years to put the whole thing together. He said he probably could have done it without assistants, but it would have taken more like ten years. The assistants' job was to do nothing but sit around watching movie after movie after movie all day long. It sounds like kind of a cushy job, but when I thought about it, I decided after about ten films, you'd be like "ugh, I don't want to be watching movies anymore!" The other thing about this project is how closely they had to have been paying attention to the screen. Some of the clips show clocks so tiny or so briefly you can barely catch them. In many of the clips, they must have had to freeze the frame and zoom in on it, even use a "sharpen" filter, to see what the clock even said. At the end of each day, they would report back to Marclay with all their findings. One of the assistants only seemed to be finding clips of people getting their heads blown off, so he was fired.

They scoured the entire history of cinema, from every part of the planet, going back 110 years or whatever. The final piece includes over 10,000 clips in all. In each of the clips, you either see a physical clock or watch showing the time, or a character in the film references a specific time of day. When that happens in the piece, it will be that exact time of day in real life. So it's actually a twenty-four-hour long "video collage" that operates as a working timepiece. It always tells you the correct time of day. It is quite seriously one of the coolest things I have ever seen.

Evidently a Wikipedia page has been building that catalogues every movie clip that viewers have identified and at what time they appear in the piece. I've been unable to locate it, but when I do, I'll edit this post to link to it.

The only films that produced no results, oddly, were Bollywood movies, which it was claimed had absolutely no clocks in them. We had a few guests from India on the line, so I mentioned this to them. One woman recalled a song that started out with "tick tick tick tick," but she couldn't remember what it was. She may have been thinking of this scene from Kal Aaj Aur Kal (1971), which does quite prominently have a clock in it. There's also this song from Shukriya (1972), and he's obviously holding a watch. There was evidently another similar song in a Bollywood film from the 1990s, but unfortunately all I could keep bringing up was the Ke$ha song. Another woman from India decided she would make it her mission to find clocks in Bollywood movies to prove this wrong. In any case, it may be that when clocks are mentioned or appear, they aren't shown clearly enough or don't accurately reference a specific time of day in the film's narrative.

In doing my research, I was reminded that I knew Christian Marclay's work already. Many, many, many years ago, I'll never remember where (possibly London?), I saw his Tape Fall (1989), wherein a reel-to-reel tape player plays the sound of trickling water as the tape trickles down to slowly form a cone-shaped pile on the gallery floor. At the time, I thought that was one of the coolest things I'd ever seen, despite it being a bit of a one-liner.

Marclay has done a lot of different kinds of work including avant-garde music. As a DJ, for instance, he would break a few records, tape them back together again, and then play them on the turntable, which would cause the stylus to bounce around madly and likely destroyed a needle or two. He apparently does not want to be known exclusively for The Clock. A struggling up-and-coming artist might be inclined to recommend he not resent the world-wide success of this piece, which has put him quite decidedly smack in the middle of the map of Contemporary Art. I can also understand his fear of being considered a one-trick pony, however.

I think the great appeal of The Clock, perhaps in contrast to some of his other more unusual works, comes from the fact that it is an astonishing, sophisticated, and mesmerizing work of Contemporary Art, but at the same time, to enjoy the piece the layperson really needs only to like movies. And who doesn't like movies? Sure, there are tons of obscure French black-and-white films from the 1930s and whenever else. But in a one-hour segment, you'd be likely to find five to ten films you've seen before and easily twice as many actors who you recognize.

There are six copies of The Clock in existence at the moment. It's sold on a disc for $150,000, which I realized is about what you'd probably pay for a rare antique Cartier watch when I thought about it. The copy shown here was purchased by a Lincoln Center board member as a gift to the Museum of Modern Art, with the provision that it could be shown at LC first. The MoMA plans to show it again this fall, but I don't have any details about that.

A few people asked if you'd be more likely to see different parts of the twenty-four-hour piece if you were to see it in, say, Sydney, Australia (where it was shown, in fact). The piece is actually a program that you load onto your computer. Once loaded, it locks onto that computer's clock, which is synched to the correct time via the internet. For anyone who's never looked up the atomic clock in Greenwich, England, your computer will be synched to it down to the very second. So when you start up The Clock program, it will automatically go straight to the part of the collage to show the correct time wherever on the planet you happen to be. If you start it running at 3:37PM, it will automatically show you 3:37PM. It's one of the things I found most awesome about the piece, and many people to whom I described that felt the same.

Marclay has a lot of rules for the way this piece may be shown. It may not be shown in a movie theater, but should be shown in something closer to an art gallery. Light and sound must be controllable and controlled. The white couches are to his specifications, rather than chairs. Viewers must be allowed to stay for as long as they wish. And while the artist does make $150,000 a copy, it must always be shown for free, which I suspect was to some degree his copyright loophole for the use of all these clips. He also hinted at the idea that, to paraphrase, if you're doing something great with the material (which he has), people tend to kind of look the other way and not make a legal fuss. The other thing I mentioned to people who asked about this is that his use of the clips is almost blandly neutral. He's not making any particular statement by putting them into this new context, much less anything defamatory or politically sensitive. It feels much more like what you see is what you get. The statements it makes about the rhythms of daily life or our perception of the passage of time are on a higher plane of comprehension entirely.

It's not just chopped together like some amateur series of clips in a YouTube video. It's fully edited together extremely seamlessly. He worked with a sound designer, as well, so the sound overlaps from one edit to the next. Some musical backgrounds overlap several video clips from different movies. I think it's one of the main reasons the work is so very hypnotic. People would go in planning to stay only an hour and would depart three, four, five hours later entirely shocked that they had stayed so long and hardly even realized it.

One of the questions we would often get was somewhat funny because the answer was so potentially confusing, especially on the weekends when we were running The Clock continuously from 8AM Friday until 10PM Sunday: "How long does it last?" "Twenty-four hours." "No, no, I mean what's the length of the video?" "Twenty-four hours." "No, I mean from the start of it to the end of it, how long does it last?" "The piece actually has a duration of twenty-four hours. You can literally sit there and watch it for twenty-four hours and not see the same thing twice." "Oooooohhh...wow!" At last count that I heard, we had about six people who stayed for the entire twenty-four-hour work. A few of them were film students, not surprisingly.

Other people would come back over and over again, not just our regular Crazies who camp out at the Atrium every day, but people who had planned to visit The Clock only once. They got so hooked that they simply had to come back again to see different times of the day. I started to recognize familiar faces after a while. This really nice little kid, maybe nine or ten, who helps his dad run the food cart at the end of the block, stood on line a few different times. "You're back again. It's really cool, isn't it?" I asked him. He grinned and nodded enthusiastically.

One woman told me that over the past year or so and in different cities (she was from Los Angeles), she'd seen all twenty-four hours of The Clock minus one eighteen-minute segment starting at 8:53PM. At around 8:40, she was still easily a half-hour away from getting in. We were ordered to restrict admittance to this thing as if it were Fort Knox, and several of the managers tyrannically stuck to this to an irritating fault. The one on duty that night, thankfully, was much more pleasant, and I really wanted to help this lady complete her impressive twenty-four hour journey there at Lincoln Center. I was sort of vicariously excited along with her. So in a hushed conversation with the manager, I asked if it wouldn't be possible to bend the rules a little. Happily, he snuck her out of the line at which point I gave her a quick grin and a thumbs up. She can now say she has seen the entire piece. Congratulations! Had all but the most heartless, petty person on that line known what was happening, I can't believe they'd have protested knowing how close she was.

I didn't work the front door very often, but it felt like a cross between the velvet ropes at Studio 54 and the pearly gates, depending on how long the line was. All the Crazies were particularly attracted to this spot. At one point, a gentleman passing by stopped to inform me that he had been harassed by the attendants inside the gallery and was very upset about it. He had been sitting there quietly watching and minding his own business, and the gallery attendants had had the nerve to hassle him for having taken his pants off. "Usually the ladies are begging me to do that," he said later. He'd evidently visited twice and took his pants off both times. After he'd walked away, someone in the line who'd overheard his complaint asked, "boxers or briefs?" But the answer from one of the reps who'd been there that day was almost as bad as "neither." 

A jock strap.

I had intermittently been announcing the rules inside the gallery to each group of people as they approached the door to go in, so I stepped out and addressed them a second time to say, "ladies and gentlemen, pants are required at all times inside the gallery." Everyone had a good laugh over that. Henceforth this individual was unofficially referred to as "No Pants Guy."

There were quite a few celebrity sightings, including Anjelica Huston and Stephen Sondheim, both of whom I missed. I did get to see actors Joel Grey and Wallace Shawn and fashion photographer Bill Cunningham, who was wearing blue. I'm not sure you could call LC president Reynold Levy a "celebrity" but he certainly wields power.

One of the best things about working there while this was going on is that I myself was able to see a total of about nine or ten hours of it on and off. I would have seen some of it regardless, but very likely I wouldn't have seen quite so much if I weren't getting paid to be there at the same time. I had heard the rumors that the best time to see was Midnight. The lady who had seen all of it but eighteen minutes confirmed this with no doubt in her voice. For most of the piece, Marclay wanted the most banal aspects of daily life (why Heads-Blown-Off Guy was fired). In other words, he didn't want a bunch of car chases, explosions, and gun fights, although there are a few of those here and there. I think it was a wise decision, because what you get in the end are these sort of pulsing rhythms of life and the currents of what we most often do at specific times of day and night. Even at Noon, although he could hardly have left out High Noon (and a brilliant movie that remains on my Top Ten list: Once Upon a Time in the West), and the tension of waiting for the clock to slowly and finally strike Twelve, he allowed no payoff to that tension. At 12:01, nothing major happens, life kind of just returns back to normal.

At Midnight, on the other hand, for pretty much just this one small section of this huge work, he allowed himself to do something big. It's a reason that when pressed for an answer to this question, I went with the suspicion that as the piece was laid out by Marclay in linear fashion, the beginning would actually have been 12:00:01AM. The clips come rapid fire. There are explosions. It pays off. I did get to see it on Friday, but unfortunately I was still on duty and somewhat distracted. I also didn't stay to see much more, because I didn't think I'd need to. The plan was to stay after my shift on Saturday to watch it, and once and for all really study it. I even asked a coworker to save a spot for me on the floor.

As my luck would have it, Saturday the 28th was the night that, at pretty much the most perfect moment to ruin Midnight for everyone, the fire alarm went off and everyone had to be evacuated. I can say no more about what happened than simply that or LC will hand me my ass on a platter. Up to a certain point, the hope was still buzzing that it might be cleared up and we might get back in before Midnight. Sadly, it was just not meant to be. At around 12:05 or so, I left the disappointed faces in the "already inside the gallery" line and returned home. I overheard the suggestion being made that they play Midnight for the crowd and then fast-forward again to the correct time, but since the program is set to work as a clock as I described above, this never would have been possible. Other folks were murmuring about Lincoln Center changing their schedule to show it again overnight on Sunday, but that would have been all but practically impossible to arrange. There is a small chance that I may try to get in to see Midnight when it shows at the MoMA, but the showing where I already work was clearly going to be infinitely easier for me and less time-consuming. Such is life, I suppose.

For anyone who has not yet seen this epic masterpiece, I urge you to please go. Earlier is better. Whatever length of line you find when you get there, I can genuinely say it is worth every minute.

©2012, Ryan Witte

News: Breuer and Morphosis

I've become a bit wrapped up in an architectural project recently that's been taking time away from the blog. That project will eventually be described at length here. In the meantime, I wanted to report something very exciting. Syracuse University has recently digitized their entire collection of Marcel Breuer's papers, including all the architectural drawings. Of course I had visited their online archives when I was working on the Litchfield story, but this wasn't available at the time. It would have made my life immeasurably easier.

In any case, this is an unbelievably valuable resource, and I must heartily thank SU for undertaking what surely was a colossal project to make it all available.

The other fantastic news is sort of an addendum to my profile of Roosevelt Island. Cornell has chosen Thom Mayne of Morphosis to design their new graduate school building there. I couldn't possibly be any more pleased that we're getting another building by this genius architect in New York, and I cannot wait to see what it will look like.

The Kinda Work U Wait 4

(ICFF)

When I came upon the booth for Al-Hamad Design, it was immediately obvious to me that there was something very interesting going on there. As I paused to take mental pictures before moving on, I noticed a nice-looking boxy wooden chair with soft, creamy leather upholstery. The person at the booth, who I later learned was the designer himself, Nanu Al-Hamad, lowered the back of the chair. It became a small table. Then he flipped a switch to turn on a light inside the box. It was also a light fixture.

I was sold. I told him it was fantastic and grabbed a card. I later discovered there's a storage compartment under the seat, as well. This thing is four objects in one, and I love that. The piece is called Little Oyster, and a custom-made grouping of them made for a specific client takes it yet still further. The custom pieces have built-in audio speakers and a built-in iPad. The lights in all the units can be dimmed by remote control and the speaker volume is wirelessly controlled from the iPad.

This kind of exploration with different functionality and technology has the potential for Al-Hamad and designers like him to stumble onto just the right and unprecedented combination of elements that could literally give birth to an entirely new kind of design object altogether. I find this incredibly exciting. It's tilling the garden of revolution.

Q8

The other equally fascinating pieces in this collection made it clear to me that I really ought to talk to Al-Hamad and find out more about his history and process. He was born in Kuwait, and would visit Southern California with his family once a year or so. When he was four, Iraq invaded Kuwait and his family moved to California permanently. He said he visited Kuwait somewhat frequently while growing up, but after finishing college in Chicago, he went to live there again for around a year. He said he loved living there and especially appreciated getting to experience it as an adult. He discovered a vibrant contemporary art scene and folks keeping alive and kicking a lot of creative underground culture. Ultimately, there were things he missed. One thing I was unaware of is that alcohol is prohibited there, which means that even if you don't drink, there are no bars or clubs or places to congregate socially aside from people's private homes. He has returned to the United States and now works out of New York City, but travels back and forth often and collaborates frequently with artists in Kuwait.

The image there is Q8, a mirror occupying roughly a three-foot square (a square meter) with the islands off Kuwait's east coast attached to the wall separately. Al-Hamad said he's always loved the the shape of the country where he was born and uses this as his bathroom mirror.

At some point during our conversation, I told Al-Hamad that from what I could tell, most of his work has a combination of three things. 1) A number of different functions in a single design object, 2) an unexpected sort of interactivity, and 3) something transcendent that begs the user to activate his or her imagination. He seemed to think that was a nice way of summarizing. Here I'll also add that they all use interesting or luxurious materials and often consciously call attention to their materiality.

Little Oyster sufficiently covers the first element. I think the piece that most simply and literally demonstrates the second and third is his Bright Idea arm chair.

It is a chair and at the same time, like much of Al-Hamad's work, a piece of Conceptual Art, as well. It's designed to encourage inspiration. You sit comfortably on its buttery Moore & Gilles leather upholstery to contemplate, and when the inspiration comes, a leather-upholstered button in the arm rest turns on a light bulb above your head. Eureka! Not content with a one-trick pony, Al-Hamad gives the piece an added bit of aesthetic distinction by providing the beautiful but relatively conventional walnut armchair with interestingly sculpted legs. The chair appears to be growing out of the floor. Furthermore, the legs pull the piece down into the floor surface far more than balls and claws might have, creating a wonderful tension with the light bulb and the abstract ideas it represents, which want to ascend up into the stratosphere.

Taking advantage of more advanced materials are two pieces of outdoor furniture, Cradle and Gibbous. Both pieces are made from a durable, waterproof, glow-in-the-dark fabric which charges in the sunlight during the day and then gives off light throughout the night. That the pieces are also light sources is not a shocker, of course. Al-Hamad loves incorporating the element of light into his work. With Cradle, it's the fact that the sort of hammock lounge is carried on rockers at the top and bottom that begs you to use your imagination. The piece encourages you to tap into some early, infantile memories of being in a cradle and to be soothed by the comfort of the rocking motion that accompanies it.

Unlike your typical cradle, this is a hammock for two. Pillow-like cushions at both ends rather than just one is another fantastic detail. Not only can you enjoy lounging with a friend or loved-one, but you can face each other to more easily converse, as well. This is not just a piece for resting, but also for socializing.

Gibbous is an ornamental object, an arm chair, an ottoman, and a back-rest all at once, and was regarded highly enough to earn an A'Design Award in 2012.

Looking closely at that image, you may notice the hand-cut brass plaque that marks every Al-Hamad Design piece, a small but very classy detail, in my opinion. The smaller section is clearly an ottoman, but can also be used as a back-rest to sit on the grass. As is no doubt obvious in the image of it opened up, when not in use, Gibbous fits back together to become as perfect a sphere as was possible given the challenge of properly upholstering something in this shape. Closed up after dark, it becomes a mysterious glowing orb haunting the landscape. "Transcendent" may be the wrong word for the image this produces, but "otherworldly" could very easily be applied to it. One measure of proof of this is that the press materials for this and Cradle make a point to identify the images in darkness as indeed being actual photographs. The visual effect is so unusual that it seems entirely justified to do so (especially with the former, because it looks almost like a computer rendering). Still, I think the effect in a landscaped backyard would be delightful and unique.

Somewhat similar in execution, though completely different in form is a custom bar Al-Hamad designed called Vertex. In spirit, it's an object of art, a large, dark, monolithic oak box with a glowing, jagged-edged acrylic cloud floating above it--simple, refined, and distinctive.

All its functions as a bar seamlessly fit into it like a jigsaw puzzle. Drawers and cabinetry all but disappear from sight. The best detail, in my opinion, is a drink cart that fits into one of the ends of the wooden base. With a handle carved carefully out of its visible wooden surface, it's easily accessed, but requires no attached hardware to mar the purity of the forms. The cart even includes integrated but removable serving trays to accommodate a multitude of hosting circumstances.

Al-Hamad has also delved fully into the world of fine art. While visiting his birth country, he visited a small island in the Persian Gulf called Failaka. Failaka Island retains some fame from Alexander the Great, who encountered it in his campaign from Greece to northern India and left some markers of Greek culture behind. It was one of the longest continuously occupied regions of Kuwait and supposedly has glorious seasonal patterns and local flora. In 1990, Iraq invaded the island, exhiling almost all its residents to mainland Kuwait. The Iraqi military used it as a base and for target practice. Sadly, this and the resulting violent expulsion of the Iraqi army by allied forces pretty much obliterated the island.

The result is a lot of ruins of what had been relatively beautiful houses, some fairly palatial. It was strange, he told me, to find houses that were essentially a bombed-out empty shell but with an oddly intact bathroom, for instance. He also said the island has become something of a tourist destination, no doubt due to its scenic beauty, but that the main resort hotel is mildly tacky. Most interesting, he found, was the graffiti. Teenagers have for some odd reason chosen this unique island as a backdrop for messages of love and the search for it. Most of it, he indicated, is of the "Carmen ♥ Faisal" variety, but the kids will also write their email addresses or similar, and quite amusingly, things from popular culture, like "Justin Bieber." Very wisely, he photographed a good number of the more interesting tags.

Those photos would become a series shown at the Sultan Gallery in Kuwait City, one of the oldest art galleries in Kuwait, founded by the late Ghazi and Najat Sultan in 1969.  It closed in 1990 and their surviving sister, Farida Sultan, reopened it in 2006 at a new, multipurpose warehouse location. Al-Hamad confessed that he finds most photography exhibits to be rather dull, though, so he decided to present his photos in a more sculptural format. Appropriate to the subject matter, which occasionally referenced social networking, he created an enormous, fully-functioning Blackberry Bold 9000 with a television monitor mounted inside it. The pictures appear in a slide show, as if seen on a giant Pop hand-held device.

He had only ever intended this to be a one-of-a-kind work of art. However, a certain businessman saw the piece and wanted one for his office. The compromise Al-Hamad made was to instead create for this client a giant Blackberry Curve 9300. This way, he didn't feel as if he were repeating himself verbatim. Moral of the story, you're unlikely to be able to talk him into making one of these for your office unless it's an entirely different device or you a$k him very, very ni$ely. Evidently, and not surprisingly, everyone who enters that client's office and sees the giant Blackberry falls in love with it.

Chandelier is also more a work of Conceptual Art than it is a piece of furniture, although Al-Hamad clearly loves to flirt with those distinctions. I say that not because it isn't a perfectly functional chair or a perfectly functional light fixture. Rather, its installation would require relatively remarkable preparations, and to experience it as its design was intended would require a bit more space than one would expect to find in a typical building interior. The legend goes that he saw a cartoon of a person swinging from a chandelier and wanted to create a more practical way to do that. So he created a low-hanging chandelier with an enormous throne sitting on top of it. The chair rises about six feet (2m), and is upholstered, impressively, in a single piece of leather with no seams.

He had considered the possibility of using camel hide to give this piece an added bit of Kuwaiti flavor, but this proved to be impossible. In talking to a dealer, he discovered that the skinning process involves first cutting off the camel's hump. So the resulting pieces of leather will decidedly have a hole in the middle, making camel hide unsuitable for applications requiring larger sheets of it.

I loved the whole mad party concept, the royal and elegant look of it, and the play of shadows from the small bulbs underneath. But it was only after contemplating this piece for a little while that its magic dawned on me. It hangs perfectly straight, in complete defiance of gravity. "How on earth did you ever balance that thing?" I had to ask him. It seemed to me that even counterweights would not be sufficient to offset the cantilevered seat and arms and the weight of the chandelier, itself. Al-Hamad explained that they went through numerous trials to get this right. In the end, a solution was found by providing a metal shop with the dimensions of a volume inside the back that would be available for counterweight. The shop then created a sheet of extremely dense metal alloy heavy enough to balance the piece. It now weighs in at around 400lbs (182kg) but hangs exactly right.

The piece I'd like to end with is the Embarakiya floor lamp. I end here not because it's my favorite. In fact, the thought of arriving home late at night to a dark apartment and having a human figure looming in the corner of my living room makes me shudder a little (I'll happily recommend it for non-residential applications). Nonetheless, I think it incorporates everything that makes Al-Hamad's work so interesting, and at the same time ends up being somewhat provocative.

Initially, the designer had conceived of this as being adorned in less culturally-specific garments, like perhaps a simple business suit. But in walking around the Embarakiya, which is the large market in Kuwait City where garments, cloth, and other items are sold and traded, he decided he really liked the idea of clothing the lamp in a traditional men's dishdasha. The clincher was when he realized that the headdress, the qitra and egal, would work perfectly as a lampshade. The male figures have speakers in their torso. I was curious if they said something, which they don't; they plug into a normal stereo system.

The female figures don't have speakers--I'll leave it for my Feminist readers to psychoanalyze that--but their garments, the abaya and hijab (or nikab) are more ornamental with, in this case, truly exquisite embroidered gold trim. The headdress fabric was thin enough to warrant a second layer, and as a result, the weave of the two layers of textile overlaps to create interesting patterns in the filtered light.

The interactivity and the transcendent are locked together here. In order to turn on the light in the figure's head, you shake its hand, which has a touch-sensor in it. It seemed to me the narrative being played out here for an American audience was quite striking; to call forth light from the head of a figure in traditional Arabian dress, you must perform a friendly, welcoming gesture with it. I first asked Al-Hamad if it were a political statement he was making. He laughed and said, "no, no, not at all." In fact, in talking to him, I quickly realized he's mostly just having fun creating the pieces that he does. My reading was all wrong, but I think that's partially the point here.

He said that the response from audiences in Kuwait was anything but disturbed. In fact, most people who saw it there simply found it amusing and clever. Responses at the ICFF were quite different. Some people actually voiced concerns about the piece, questioning if those who came across this might have a problem with it. That seemed sadly xenophobic to me at best, and at worst, kind of downright racist. This was why I asked not that question, but the one I did, which was about the differences between the responses from Kuwaiti audiences and the white, European-American ones at the show.

Whether intentional or not, it's incredibly rare to find a work of mere furniture design that can elicit such wildly different emotions from different people. I think the lesson to be learned from this work is that it's those very differences that we must set aside--along with the kind of unnecessarily political readings to which I admittedly fell victim--so we can just have fun and enjoy being a part of a truly global design community.

Much thanks to Nanu Al-Hamad. I'll be eager to see what brilliant directions he takes us next.

All images courtesy Al-Hamad Design. All text ©2012, Ryan Witte.