January 2010
19 posts
2 tags
The Mysteries of Retail
I loved this the last time, design bestsellers and bombs, via New York Times Home section. These are the stores that are carefully curating their selection, not selling the same things that you can get online for less, and, I bet, exist in quirky spaces of their own.
However, their customers clearly exist in a different retail universe than I do. I don’t spend more than $100 easily, and...
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Write What You Know
My handwriting should be a font. That’s what everyone has been saying since I was about 12, and while I agree it is true, it never seems like a compliment to me. What good is handwriting nowadays? To have nice handwriting seems sort of like a secretarial skill. My mother, my grandmother and one of my aunts also have good handwriting, and there’s a certain familial evolution from...
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More! Women! Architects!
Is this paragraph a form of apology for that ridiculous Zaha Hadid profile?
A lot of attention—in Chicago, at least—has been given to the fact that Aqua is the tallest building in the world designed by a woman. That’s nice for [Jeanne] Gang, but beside the point, and dwelling on it leads too easily to predictable interpretations of skyscrapers as symbols of male identity. Gang’s achievement...
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Suburban Design
Design Observer alerts us to a new website devoted to the work of Lester Beall, always my favorite of the cadre of mid-century corporate identity designers for the color, energy and sheer American-ness of his design. I had just been thinking about his letterhead last week, a propos of Letterheady, since it had a very chic LB picked out in perforations.
I discuss Beall’s work for...
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Pay No Attention to Me
In one of those strange topical coincidences, this Sunday’s Arts & Leisure section has a profile of Iwan Baan, a Dutch architectural photographer who, Fred A. Bernstein claims, is the post-Stoller-Shulman-Molitor savior of architectural photography.
Mr. Baan’s work, while still showing architecture in flattering lights and from carefully chosen angles, does away with the old feeling...
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Buildings That Aren't There
Look at this photo. This is an actual building. Or at least, James Russell’s review of the new Apple Store in The Architect’s Newspaper tells me it is. Since I try to avoid going to the Upper West Side, I may never know that for a fact. My eyes aren’t telling me this building exists.
More and more I find myself squinting at the tiny credits on pictures of architecture. If it...
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Hands-On: The Gropius Touch
My story on the Museum of Modern Art’s Bauhaus Lab and the 3D workshop led by Ati Gropius Johansen, daughter of Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius, student of Josef Albers at Black Mountain College, wife of Harvard 5 architect John Johansen is up today on The Moment, the T Magazine blog.
This was a thrill to write: I couldn’t believe no one else had noticed that Johansen was coming to...
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A Real Modern Monument
A happy preservation story: Peter Behrens’ AEG Turbine Hall, now 100 years old, still in use, and still as striking as the day it was completed. Shouldn’t that be the goal for every building?
The structure went up in less than a year, and when it was finished, observers scrambled to find words to describe it — an “iron church,” a “cathedral of machines,” a “temple of work.”
An...
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Love and Flatware
There’s a scene in Sleepless in Seattle (It was on TV last week and yes, I got sucked in to watching the last half hour. Meg Ryan looked very nice in a French braid, but there was a lot of sighing.) where Meg and hapless Bill Pullman, her fiance, are in Tiffany & Co. They wander around the tabletop section, followed by a registry clerk, and she pauses in front of a vitrine filled with...
6 tags
Trip Down Memory Lane
Bridget Riley, Fission (1963) Gift of Philip Johnson to MoMA.
Yellow Submarine, “Sea of Holes” (1968)
In my ongoing project to give my son as much of a 1970s childhood as possible (Osh Kosh engineers overalls; Fisher Price Little People airport, the one with the crank that moves helicopter and baggage carousel; Old School Sesame Street) we recently ran across all of the 1968...
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Inappropriation
CB2, $79.95
Christien Meindertsma, $1100 (down from $1600)
This Urchin Pouf is an expensive contemporary design object I truly adore, especially after seeing the yarn and the needles in person on Governors Island this summer. Hence my shock at seeing an extremely cheap version in the new CB2 catalog, which is rife with subtle and not-so-subtle revisions of Danish modern, Bertoia, Noguchi,...
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The Yuck Factor
Watch District 9 as a palate cleanser after the visual feast of Avatar. Many of the themes are the same, but the South African film’s more-with-less attitude has an emotional punch that those beautiful blue creatures can’t offer.
Again, we have civilization vs. so-called savages. Again, the military-industrial complex assumes its superiority and offering false salvation in...
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Snip Snip Snip
It made the Approval Matrix this week, so I suppose it is not too late to pile on and highly recommend the Museum of Arts & Design’s Slash: Paper Under the Knife, as the must-see of the winter season. I have many problems with MAD (the new name, the new building, the new mark, I could go on) but this show includes some truly spectacular work. Everyone seems to be nattering on about the...
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It's Not Just Me
Way back in the beginnings of blogging in July, I praised the French film Summer Hours. I have recommended it to many people since, but few have seen it. Lo and behold, it is all over the New York Times’ critics picks for Oscar nominees (along with a lot of other willful choices). In honor of judgement confirmed, I want to re-post my original comments about the film. Among many other...
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On DO: Skating on the Edge of Taste
This is The American Restaurant in Kansas City, 1974, designed by Warren Platner and the subject of a long essay on that architect and interior designer’s career, posted yesterday on Design Observer. It is at the top of the Crown Center, designed by Edward Larrabee Barnes in a rather more sedate manner. As I wrote:
In this glass box, Platner installed what I can only describe as the...
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I Heart Huxtable
I know, earlier this week I said I liked her 1960s work better. But Ada Louise Huxtable is still the most knowledgeable, elegant, thoughtful critic out there. Witness her review of Eero Saarinen: Shaping the Future (closing Jan. 31). While other critics dithered about the politics of it all, seeming to blame Eero Saarinen for suburbanization, capitalism and Frank Gehry, Huxtable glides on by,...
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About A Boy
I have always liked Michael Chabon. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay is one of my favorite contemporary novels. His interests in Lego, comics, assimilationist Jewishness all dovetail with mine. And indeed, as revealed in Manhood for Amateurs, a collection of his (mostly) previously published musings on children, men, women and toys, we also both like Dr. Who and worry about what to do...
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Size M
Isamu Noguchi, Red Cube; Francis Dzikowski/Esto
In that strange week between Christmas and New Year’s Day, in which work published hardly seems to have happened, the New York Times ran an article on Vin Cipolla, the semi-new head of the Municipal Art Society. All speakers, including Cipolla, seemed to agree that the MAS has slumped from its glory days defending Grand Central Terminal....
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Annotated Avatar
It seemed half my extensive family had gone to Avatar last week, and half those who went were planning to return to see it in 3D. Meaning that, without Twitter, I can tell the film has legs. The dialogue is terrible (half the scenes in the action-heavy latter third could be subtitled “Whoo-hoo!”), the plot creaky (seriously, “unobtanium”!?), but the visual effects were...
