2 | WEDNESDAY, JULY 31, 2019 THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
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The goal of the workshop was to en-
visage structures — woven from bam-
boo, a local and sustainable resource —
to provide shade for the park, or struc-
tures that would filter sunlight through
roadway openings onto the dark
streetscape below. Ms. Martin, the
British artist, typically weaves small-
scale paper objects — a torus, a basket, a
bikini — or medium-size bamboo struc-
tures, like a tunneling garden trellis
built with bamboo from her backyard.
Lately, her work is attracting the atten-
tion of architects and engineers, and she
has begun to pursue various collabora-
tions.
Mr. Solly, Ms. Martin’s partner for the
workshop, is a director at Format Engi-
neers in Bath, England. The firm is per-
haps best known for its work with Ar-
thur Mamou-Mani, the French archi-
tect, and his design for the 2018 Burning
Man temple, “Galaxia,” built with trian-
gular timber trusses fixed with metal
brackets.
What Mr. Solly and Ms. Martin both
appreciate about woven structures is
that there are no nuts and bolts, and few
fixings. For the most part, woven bam-
boo holds itself in place through the fric-
tion of the over-under-over-under inter-
sections. And it’s a “form-finding”
process. As Ms. Martin explained to her
students, “It’s about letting the bamboo
do what it wants to.”
Mr. Solly said he admired Ms. Mar-
tin’s craft-based perspective and logic-
based shape creation. “What’s fun about
Alison’s work is how beautiful it is, and it
just comes from her head,” he said. “I
could spend ages trying to work out on a
computer what she does quickly in a tac-
tile fashion.”
The two first met in person last fall at
a conference on Advances in Architec-
tural Geometry, and with the São Paulo
workshop they found an opportunity to
collaborate. As an engineer, Mr. Solly en-
visioned translating Ms. Martin’s im-
pressive vocabulary of shapes onto big-
ger structures. “Let’s scale it up,” he
said.NUISANCE BECOMES A RESOURCE
Ms. Martin studied graphic design in the
1970s in London at what is now Central
Saint Martins, and began weaving a dec-
ade later, when life took a detour. In 1985,
her husband, Mauro Cuomo, an Italian
computer scientist, left his job at Apple,
and they moved back to Italy, eventually
settling in the remote Tuscan hill town of
Fivizzano.
“That’s where one thing led to an-
other,” Ms. Martin said. She focused on
her family of five and her “one-woman
mission impossible” to make them self-
sufficient on their small holding. The
property had come cheap, thanks to a
large stand of invasive bamboo.
“We had to chop the bamboo down ev-
ery year to stop it from getting into the
olives and vines and other things I was
trying to grow,” she said. Eventually, she
realized that the best way to deal with
bamboo was to treat it as a resource, an
opportunity.
She made practical garden structures
to support climbing plants — peas and
borlotti beans, cucumbers, pumpkins
and melons. She built chicken coops,
raised beds, covers for hay and wood
piles as well as shade structures. But
she became frustrated with the bamboo
construction techniques she found on-
line. It became clear that the weaving
could be doing more of the work — “if I
pushed it a bit,” she said. She made mod-
els with strips of paper, grew curious
about the difference between biaxial
and triaxial weaves (with two or three
straight strips) and studied how non-
Euclidean geometry could be applied to
weaving.
For instance, a basket maker might
start with a woven tessellation of hexa-
gons. Swapping out one hexagon for a
polygon with fewer sides — a pentagon,
say — introduces a singularity and gen-
erates positive curvature, like the outer
curve of a doughnut. Swapping in a poly-gon with more sides, such as an octagon,
generates negative curvature, like a
doughnut’s interior. The trick is intu-
iting, based on the desired structure,
where in the weave to place this singu-
larity, and what type of singularity it
should be.
Ms. Martin searched the internet for
images of hexagonal mesh structures
resembling the objects she was creat-
ing. There she encountered Alan
Mackay, a crystallographer who pre-
dicted the existence of quasi crystals,
and Eiji Osawa, a chemist who predicted
the structure of the buckminster-fullerene, a soccer-ball-shaped molecule
made of 60 carbon atoms. These scien-
tists made use of the same geometric
rules and often gave a nod to patterns
they had observed in the weave of tradi-
tional bamboo vases and baskets.
“That was a revelation,” Ms. Martin
said during her lecture. “I felt like I had
something really nice in my hands.”
In 2011, she met Kenneth Snelson, a
sculptor, at a seminar in Rome. His
motto — “weaving, mother of tenseg-
rity” — made an impression, as did Anni
Albers, a weaver, and Ruth Asawa, a
sculptor who once said: “Sculpture islike farming. If you just keep at it, you
can get quite a lot done.”
“That’s the way I see things,” said Ms.
Martin. “I’m not dedicated all day every
day to my oeuvre. A little bit every day
adds up to something.”
In 2015, she won first prize at the Fu-
ture Vision contest organized by the In-
ternational Association for Shell and
Spatial Structures. Her entry, a 13-foot-
wide hyperbolic Lycra-patchwork mo-
bile, won out over 27 competing entries
from the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, Cambridge University and
the engineering office ARUP.More recently, she began collaborat-
ing with Phil Ayres, an architect with the
Center for Information Technology and
Architecture at the Royal Danish Acad-
emy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen. “The
key insight that I got from Alison is how
you control double curvature in the
weave system,” he said.
Last year, they published a paper,
“Beyond the Basket Case,” investigat-
ing how to translate traditional weaving
knowledge into computational design
tools. Now they are exploring how to
make the rules of weaving attainable at
an architectural scale. “There is a lot tolearn from her in terms of the logic of the
weave,” he said.“THE FREE AND SENSUAL CURVE”
The plan for that Tuesday on the Min-
hocão was to build a dome from 30 strips
of bamboo, harvested the weekend be-
fore from the hillside garden of James
Elkis, a pioneer of the medium, who
lives southwest of São Paulo. (Ms. Mar-
tin had seen his bamboo constructions
online about 15 years ago, and when Mr.
Elkis mentioned that he now made bicy-
cle frames from bamboo, Ms. Martin be-
gan twisting a strip into a wheel.)
The group — 27 aspiring young archi-
tects and urban and landscape design-
ers from around the world — had done a
practice run with their tutors on the
weekend, with limited success. Their
dome, woven upright, was skewed and
pointy at the top, rather than round.
A crucial part of the workshop curric-
ulum was digital parameterization —
simulating structures on the computer
and tweaking design parameters from
one iteration to the next. For example, a
software tool, K2Engineering, designed
by Cecilie Brandt-Olsen, predicts a ma-
terial’s internal “bending stress” based
on the applied force.
Mr. Solly, having crunched the bam-
boo’s numbers and consulted the paper
model, proposed a solution for the skew-
ing: the dome could instead be woven
flat on the ground and then “popped up.”
Ms. Martin thought that bending the
strips all at once might cause breakage.
But they were eager to get a proof of
concept, one way or another.
Setting out from the workshop’s base
at Escola Da Cidade, a private college
for architecture and urbanism, the bam-
boo caravan wound its way toward the
freeway, occasionally breaking into
song — “Believe,” by Cher, and “Evidên-
cias,” by the Brazilian duo Chitãozinho &
Xororó. The group walked up an exit
ramp, found a favorable site and began
marking the dome’s 50-foot circumfer-
ence in chalk on the roadway.
Visible on the skyline was Oscar Nie-
meyer’s sinuous residential high-rise,
the Edificio Copan. “It’s not the right an-
gle that attracts me, nor the straight
line, hard, inflexible,” Niemeyer once
said. “What attracts me is the free and
sensual curve — the curve that I find in
the mountains of my country.”
Once all the strips were woven on the
roadway — combining weaving princi-
ples with a fivefold symmetry pattern
typical of Islamic geometry — the stu-
dents moved swiftly, lifting the spray of
bamboo and bending down the verticals.
The dome popped into shape nicely, as
Mr. Solly had predicted. “James de-
serves all the credit,” Ms. Martin said.
Still, she told the students, “the comput-
er is not your only tool. There’s a lot of
information in the paper model.”
For the remainder of the week, the
students assembled in design teams and
envisaged their own structures for the
park. One team went for a decorative,
50-foot Möbius loop. Another produced
a rolling swoosh that became an irresist-
ible tunnel for skateboarders when in-
stalled on the Minhocão during the
workshop’s final day.
“It was wild fun,” said Camila Calegari
Marques, an architect and a Martin
groupie of sorts, having participated in a
2017 workshop in Barcelona that in-
volved weaving with wooden strips.
And the dome, it turned out, not only
assembled well but also disassembled
and reassembled efficiently — it went
up again during the finale. Ms. Martin
said, “We had even more useful struc-
tural properties than I had envisaged:
deployability, nice structural stability
and highly portable.”
At one point, the group stood back
from their dome, admired it and then
looked to Mr. Lee: Where to next?
“Na curva!” he said: At the curve.
They hoisted the dome — with Mr. Lee’s
6-year-old daughter underneath, seated
on Mr. Solly’s shoulders — and, singing
again, walked it down the Minhocão to
the desired bend in the road.Exploring structures woven from bamboo
WEAVING, FROM PAGE 1Clockwise from top: Workshop students carrying a bamboo dome, a model for a shading structure for a park envisaged on the Minhocão, an elevated roadway in São Paulo, Brazil;
James Solly, one of the leaders of the urban design workshop; and Alison Grace Martin, a weaver and artist who is promoting the use of woven bamboo in architecture.PHOTOGRAPHS BY GABRIELA PORTILHO FOR THE NEW YORK TIMESLONDON Bryan Magee, a philosopher,
writer and broadcaster who sought to
bring philosophy to a mass audience in
Britain through radio and television,
died on Friday in Oxford, England. He
was 89.
His death, at a nursing home, was
confirmed by Henry Hardy, his execu-
tor.
A prolific author familiar to readers
on both sides of the Atlantic, Mr. Magee
was best known in Britain as a television
personality who challenged a popular
aversion to programs showing only talk-
ing heads. He sought to demonstrate
that ideas could be as engaging as im-
ages.
On the television program “Men of
Ideas,” broadcast in the late 1970s, he in-
terviewed prominent philosophers of
his time, including Isaiah Berlin, Iris
Murdoch and Noam Chomsky.
“There is, throughout television, an
urge to translate all subject matter into
entertainment, and because this mili-
tates against the making of serious de-
mands on the viewer, the result is a com-
mon refusal to confront the making ofdifficult things clear as a task to be tack-
led,” he wrote in the introduction to his
book “Men of Ideas” ( 1979), which was
based on the television show.
“A successful program is thought of as
one which diverts, entertains, amuses,
informs, or simply retains the interested
attention,” he added. “If you make seri-ous demands on viewers, it is feared,
you are bound to drive most of them
away.”
His programs on the BBC — another
was “The Great Philosophers,” airing in
the late 1980s — did not look like much.
One critic described them as “two
boffins on a sofa.” Mr. Magee and a con-temporary philosopher would sit on a
sofa against a gray or brown back-
ground, exploring the seminal works of
the likes of Plato and Wittgenstein, or
talking about modern philosophy.
But the format gave scores of stu-
dents and others a concise and effective
introduction to philosophy that left a
lasting impression.
Mr. Magee also wrote and edited 23
books, including memoirs, social com-
mentary, a volume of poetry and a novel.
“The Story of Philosophy” and “The
Great Philosophers: An Introduction to
Western Philosophy” were among his
most popular works, providing genera-
tions of students with a summary of the
principal schools of thought.
The composer Richard Wagner was
another passion. Mr. Magee’s book “The
Tristan Chord: Wagner and Philosophy”
(2001), “amounts to an intellectual biog-
raphy of this most multifaceted of com-
posers,” the critic John Rockwell wrote
in his review in The New York Times.
“For those who love Wagner, ‘The
Tristan Chord’ is quite simply indispens-
able,” he added.
The last volume of Mr. Magee’s mem-
oir, “Making the Most of It,” was pub-
lished in 2018, ending a trilogy that be-
gan with “Clouds of Glory: A Hoxton
Childhood” in 2003 and included “Grow-
ing Up in a War,” which won the J.R. Ack-
erley Prize for autobiography.Bryan Edgar Magee was born on
April 12, 1930, in the working-class dis-
trict of Hoxton in East London to Fred
and Kath (Lynch) Magee. His father,
who ran a clothing shop, encouraged his
son’s interest in Wagner and leftist poli-
tics.
He wrote in “Clouds of Glory” that the
seeds of “a certain amount of psycholog-
ical harm that made itself felt later in
life” were planted during a childhood in
which his mother “made a habit of hit-
ting me in the face” and told an acquaint-
ance that she had “never felt the slight-
est affection” for him or his sister, Joan.
The young Mr. Magee won a schol-
arship in 1941 to Christ’s Hospital in Sus-
sex, a private school. There, his experi-
ence echoed that of many British intel-
lectuals of diverse backgrounds. “The
way I spoke changed — I learned to
speak like everyone around me, but not
consciously,” he told The New States-
man magazine last year.
He went on to study history, philoso-
phy, politics and economics at Keble Col-
lege, Oxford. His contemporaries there
in the early ’50s were William Rees-
Mogg, future editor of The Times of Lon-
don; Jeremy Thorpe, who became
leader of the Liberal Party; and Michael
Heseltine, who went on to serve in the
governments of Margaret Thatcher and
John Major.
Mr. Magee carved out a political ca-reer of his own, serving as a member of
Parliament for the Labour Party start-
ing in 1974. He quit Labour and became a
member of Parliament for the short-
lived Social Democratic Party from 1982
to 1983, losing his seat in the 1983 gen-
eral election.
Having realized that he would not
achieve his dream of reaching high of-
fice, he immersed himself in the study of
philosophy and music.
His brief marriage to Ingrid Soder-
lund in Sweden ended in divorce. They
had one daughter, Gunnela Mateluna,
who survives him, along with three
grandchildren and four great-grandchil-
dren.
Mr. Magee later lived alone in Oxford
and moved into the nursing home in his
last years.
Among his later works was “Ultimate
Questions,” which examined some of the
hardest questions confronting hu-
mankind, such as “do we cease to exist
when we die?”
“The future is full,” he wrote. “We just
do not yet know what it is. The events
that will fill it are as concrete, factual
and specific as those that fill our past.”
“Each one of us has no choice but to
live the whole of his life in his own little
bit of time. That is his ration, his all. In
life as we know it, time is the cruellest,
the most lethal of all the forms of our lim-
itation.”He used philosophy to beguile TV audiences in Britain
BRYAN MAGEE
1930-BY PALKO KARASZBryan Magee, the British philosopher, writer and TV personality, in 1976. He believed
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