September 2009
14 posts
6 tags
D/R Rising
D/R is back. Cambridge blogs have been twittering about it all month, and there’s an official press opening later in October, but anyone with eyes can see that the Design Research Headquarters Building, corner of Brattle and Story Streets in Harvard Square, has been restocked with the Marimekko textiles and clothes, Joe Colombo plastic chairs and white wool sofas, Scandinavian glassware...
4 tags
Lost Research
I have been to a lot of architecture archives. There were the files from a 35-year practice, stacked in two-by-three foot boxes five high in a storage unit in Norwalk, CT. I and another graduate student dragged them into the fluorescent-lit hallway and pawed through, a five-hour day that would generate enough material for an entire chapter in my dissertation. There was the university archive,...
5 tags
My Idea of Hell
There is no upside in criticizing Kelly Wearstler, since her press machine just rolls on, as she changes outfits hourly and houses annually. But after reading profiles of her in both the New Yorker and in Vogue (the New Yorker irritated me, any question about her awesomeness from unnamed sources “what her critics call ‘muchness’”, “A local interior decorator calls...
6 tags
Nothing Runs Like A...
From the files of my dissertation, Tower Typewriter and Trademark, a note about Deere & Company’s foray into the consumer market. Lawn tractors proved popular, but the attempt to ape Detroit’s something-for-everyone approach was as ill-fated as Ken Cosgrove’s decision to bring one to the Sterling Cooper office on Episode 6 of Mad Men.
The company colors were one element...
6 tags
Crafting a City
Two of my favorite things came together this weekend: Dutch design and Governors Island. As part of a series of events celebrating Henry Hudson’s “discovery” of his namesake river in 1609, the island played host to Pioneers of Change, a two-week exhibition of Dutch design, architecture, fashion and high-concept no-category installations (the doilies, truth be told, were a...
4 tags
White Columns
My friend Ben, who has been working as a preparator at the new Walt Disney Family Museum at the Presidio in San Francisco, and who is known to make a corset or two in his spare time, recommended Valentino: The Last Emperor to me when last we met, probably when we were talking about our mutual Project Runway love. What the PR contestants make wild stabs at, Valentino has been doing for the last...
4 tags
On the Grid
There’s a great shot at the hospital in last Sunday’s episode of Mad Men, “The Fog,” where the checkerboard carpet on the floor rises to meet the real and reflected squares of light on the dark shiny ceiling. (I can’t find it online, and I don’t have DVR.) We’ve seen these converging grids before at the Sterling Cooper offices, and now they are...
6 tags
Higher and Higher
In his back-page New York Times Book Review essay on The Complete Stories of J.G. Ballard, Jonathan Lethem makes many good points about Ballard’s visionary writing, “desolate landscapes” and his linkages with other arts.
Every bit as striking as Ballard’s feeling for entropy is his engagement with arts from which literature too often seems quarantined: music, sculpture,...
4 tags
Just Looking
At a certain point during our three-year renovation, I OD’d on design websites. I couldn’t look at another wallpaper-inspired, radically-simplified, IKEA-hacked, upcycled fill-in-the-blank, much as I sometimes needed to choose tile or a shower curtain or a coffee maker. Now that we are done, my purchases tend to design-free diapers and Carters pajamas (though in truth, I did avoid...
4 tags
Healthy Home
Until I graduated from college, I was always making something. Drawing, painting, potting as a child, then drafting and model-making as a would-be architect. I miss it, but I have had a hard time settling on a craft as an adult. Usually cooking gives me some of the same feeling, especially when I get creative, as with my Monday triumph: Corn/Cabbage/Kidney Bean Salad, with a lime vinagrette.
...
4 tags
Grounded
“Happy Feet,” the reliably funny Alexandra Jacobs’s feature on Zappos in the latest New Yorker was not at all what I was expecting. I can’t tell if the story is what she was expecting either. I thought it would be about online shopping: how shoes, as a category, have triumphed over our fear of not being able to try things on. I knew there would be a Sex and the City...
6 tags
First Flight
I think my two-year-old made his first interpretation of art on Saturday. We drove up to Storm King Art Center in the Hudson Highlands because it was a beautiful day and a holiday weekend and a sculpture park is the perfect way to keep both parents and toddler happy. Nothing but grass and big indestructible beasts, like this 1975 Alexander Calder, titled “The Arch”. It sits in a...
5 tags
Won't Get Fooled Again
News that Atlantic Yards developer Forest City Ratner had hired boutique New York firm SHoP to design the project’s arena (with Ellerbe Becket, whose “airplane hangar” design was widely derided, still on board to help with specifics) broke yesterday in the New York Observer. I like the work of SHoP, one of those contemporary youngish firms not mentioned in Nicolai...
5 tags
