December 2009
15 posts
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Last Post of 2009: Interview, Casey Jones
I interviewed the GSA’s newish head of Design Excellence, Casey Jones, earlier this month about the future of this government program to ensure better architecture for government buildings. It went up on Design Observer today (I hope) as a positive vision of things to come. Above, the Edith Green-Wendell Wyatt Federal Building in Portland, wrapped for the 2010s in a green screen.
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After Buildings
Looking over the 10 Best architecture lists for this year and this decade (in whatever form, numerical, chronological, thematic) I notice one thing: no buildings. The High Line, the TKTS steps, the paint-your-own parks in Times and Herald Squares, green design as a concept, social design as a movement, the WTC as an absence. Curbed published a list of the biggest non-buildings, and it was more...
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The Women
Zaha Hadid, The Peak Project, Kowloon, Hong Kong (1991)
Last week was the week the New York Times discovered there were no successful female directors. Or maybe just one. The contrast between Manohla Dargis’s truth-telling rant on Jezebel and Daphne Merkin’s accepting profile of Nancy Meyers in the magazine could not have been more stark. One blew up the annual think-piece about...
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Exciting Multi-Generational Moment
I come from a long line of designers: my great-grandmother was an art teacher, my maternal grandparents were trained at Pratt in graphic and industrial design, and my mother is a graphic designer and historian. At age 10 or so, I learned how to work a typositor. We even have a namesake typeface, Scotford Uncial. Our professional spheres have overlapped just a few times, but today they coincide:...
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Want to Make an Architect Cry?
Give him (or her, but she’s less likely to mind) Robert A. M. Stern’s latest monograph, which, at 600+ pages, covers just his last five years of work. Five. It is really a flabbergasting number of buildings, boom years or no boom years, and that after 40 years of practice. (Full disclosure: Bob Stern sent me this book as a gift, since I have been on his mailing list ever since I wrote...
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Making a list...
Is it weird that I love 10 Best lists? Maybe not, because when critics are forced into a 10 Best list they actually tell you what they like, no bullshit, no weasel words. In my limited experience it feels like a crushing burden when you are being forced by your editor to do it, but then people actually read your list, unlike that “endless” 500-word article.
The New Yorker has a...
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Playing House
Modern Family is really funny. Yes, I like something, and it is on TV! The set-up seems overly complex, with an unseen documentary crew, three families that are somehow related, and lots of pre-teen kids, but in fact all of that post-modern framing makes it brisk and funny. Scenes don’t get drawn out, because they can always cut to a character’s recap of the outcome, and the visual...
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In a F.O.G.
Image of DZ Bank, Berlin, by Manuela Martin
The fall semester is not yet over, and I have been plunged into spring semester planning. I am teaching architecture criticism again, this time to undergraduates in NYU’s Urban Design and Architecture Studies program. I am thinking of adding films for the first time, partly as a fill-in for days when written critiques are due and few students...
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Seasons Greetings
Is there anything less contemporary than a Christmas card? (As the daughter of a Jewish father I only send cards that read “Happy New Year!” but I call them Christmas cards anyway.) In my memories of childhood December brought a flood of two types of card: the folded kind, with a red or green background and Santa-snowmen-snowflakes-pine trees embossed in silver or gold; and the photo...
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Where Have All the Type Geeks Gone?
Something has been bothering me about the Up In the Air ads. Not the cute teaser ads with little airplane, jaunty and retro, like the branding campaign JetBlue wishes it had, Alexander Girard’s Braniff extravaganza. The ones with George Clooney—nothing wrong with that, haircut looks good, better cast as a soulless man—and yet, they seemed to be lacking something.
It finally...
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UN, Now and Then
The United Nations is about to undergo a five-year renovation, systems and sustainability upgrade and preservation effort. Staff members have already left the Secretariat, spread out over a million square feet in midtown (and some poor souls in LIC). A white trailer city has sprung up on the complex’s lawn—the corrugated metal facades could look like the work of Fumihiko Maki, but...
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Dumbing Down DIY
A propos of Todd Oldham, and modernist innovation, and Duchampian transformations of the everyday into art, and the depressing packaging of creativity into neat little kits, I give you the DIY Anni Albers Strainer and Paper Clips Jewelry Kit. At Urban Outfitters. Part of a line of products, many now marked down to $4.99 This is cheaper than if you bought the parts at the hardware store like...
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DoubleX: Kid Made Modern reviewed
My review (with DIY slideshow!) of Todd Oldham’s Kid Made Modern is up on DoubleX today. Needless to say, it is much less happy happy, joy joy than most of the other coverage. A sampling:
But to want your children to make something modern is to art-direct their elementary school experience. And isn’t that the opposite of creative? Aggressively aiming your children to follow in the...
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DWR = D/R?
I read Fast Company’s story The Rise and Fall of Design Within Reach with great interest. DWR founder Rob Forbes wrote the introduction to my book on Design Research, and said that D/R was his original inspiration (he even tried to buy the name—might have been a good thing, given all the snarky variations on “within reach” out there). And now, like D/R in the late 1970s,...
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XL
UnBeige informs me that the High Museum of Art has prepared a tribute to John Portman, Atlanta’s ur-architect and greatest claim to urban influence (judgment suspended). The mind reels with metastatic critical possibilities for such a show—Mike Davis on the Bonaventure Hotel, quotations from J.G. Ballard’s High Rise—but one suspects this is not that show. Portman’s...