May 2010
16 posts
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The Plastics
Feeling guilty about my blog this week. It is not that my mind is blank, but that this month’s Vogue, which had several enraging features, is not yet fully online except for Blake Lively, bathing suits, clear plastic. So I will tell you an anecdote. The suits she’s wearing (by Michael Kors) reminded me of my Outward Bound experience in Maine, Summer 1990. I was on the trip because I...
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Modernism on the Range
Thinking about The Incredibles and design after reading this piece by Jessica Helfand, I was remembering how amused I was that the Incredibles lived in a little Marcel Breuer butterfly-roof box (great screenshots at The Mid-Century Modernist), one much like the 1948 House in the Museum Garden.
Then, messing around on YouTube in search of things to show my son that aren’t...
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On Fast Company: Why Do Designer Toys Suck?
Their headline, not mine. But seriously, spare me the good-looking trophy toys. I’ll take an operational plastic garbage truck any day.
It was perhaps the fifth or sixth time I found myself, flat on the floor, arm extended, sweeping a broom under the couch to try to retrieve the quarter-size wheels of my son’s Automoblox Minis that I thought, “This is not a good design.”
Everything...
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The Anti-Enthusiasts
Design Blogs: The Vacuum of Enthusiasm, my Design Observer manifesto on what the world of design on the internet needs (critique, history, experience) lives on in the comments. Recent commenters have offered up a potpourri of blogs with the edge I’ve been missing. A few highlights:
Mirror Mirror (with whom I have corresponded about our mutual befuddlement over Kelly Wearstler) on Lonny....
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On DO: 'Please Give' and Design People
When I first saw the house that is now my home, it was hardly in an appealing state. Every window was obscured layers of screens, shutters and (amateur) stained glass. The bathroom was encrusted in pink-orange Mexican tiles, with trim to match. The living room walls looked like they were covered in moldy cork, actually wallpaper. I saw a man walk in, blanch, and walk out the front door of...
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The Naive Tumblr
Newsweek reblogged Bijan and praised Tumblr.
David Karp, Tumblr’s founder and ceo, said that while the Tumblr Dashboard has gained a tremendous amount of functionality over the past three years, many of the newer features are simply unnecessary for first time users.
For example, things like number of followers, or number of “likes”, messages or even Radar don’t mean much for day 1 users.
So...
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It Was All Yellow
I have been reading a variety of best-selling design-related books (Buying In, Mauve, Substance of Style, Deluxe) because (naturally) I would love to write a best-selling design-related book. What has struck me about them, above all else, is their fear of aesthetics. They are in a strange way primers about how to write about design without using your eyes, fingers, associative powers. They talk...
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In Metropolis: The Visceralist
The Visceralist, my profile of 2010 AIA Gold Medal-winner Peter Bohlin (of Apple-tects Bohlin Cywinski Jackson) is now up on Metropolis magazine’s website, as well as in their May issue. I spent a day and a half with Bohlin in deepest Pennsylvania and New York State, and was very impressed with his house projects and attitude toward design. The Envelope House (2006), in Seattle, is shown...
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Jane Jacobs Is Still Watching
I have been re-reading Jane Jacobs this week (not nearly as fun as re-reading Jane Austen, which might be the only thing Elena Kagan and I have in common), and despite my dislike of her beef with architects and planners, so many points seem strangely prescient. Like this:
We are the lucky possessors of a city order that makes it relatively simple to keep the peace because there are plenty of...
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On Inksie: Good design is aesthetic
I was asked by the editors of Inksie to write about Dieter Rams and his ten principles for good design. Luckily they assigned me my favorite: Good design is aesthetic, and asked Pavel Fuksa to illustrate.
I believe this. Don’t you? You must, or you wouldn’t be reading this journal which, with its gray-on-gray scheme and boxy layout, resembles the aesthetic ideal to which Dieter Rams’ designs...
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On Archpaper: Saccharine Design
My review of Marcel Wanders’ exhibition Daydreams at the Philadelphia Museum of Art for The Architect’s Newspaper just went online. Let’s just say I was not impressed.
I’ve always seen Wanders’ work juxtaposed with minimalism or with the rougher-edged contemporaries at Droog. The contrast makes those flowers and ruffles seem subversive, but here they just seem pretty, even...
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Straw Men Redux
Compare. Nicolai Ouroussoff, May 5, 2010:
Change comes slowly, at least psychologically, to Greenwich Village, which, despite the double-decker tourist buses and the crowds (still) lining up for cupcakes in front of the Magnolia Bakery, persists in thinking of itself as a sleepy bohemian enclave.
So the design for the New School’s 365,000-square-foot University Center on Fifth Avenue ...
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Category Error
My son is one of those children who loves vehicles. I had nothing to do with it (I hate to drive, and hence can never leave New York). But our living room is paved with a hundred Matchbox cars, 1/16 scale Bruder earth movers, and a vintage Fisher Price airport with operational helicopter. When we take out crayons, I am told to draw a bulldozer. When we take out Play-Doh, to make a bulldozer...
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Icon Review: Attila
I wrote a review of Attila—music by Verdi, sets by Herzog & de Meuron, costumes by Miuccia Prada—for Icon Magazine’s April issue. My first foray into set design critique.
At the Metropolitan Opera’s new production of Attila, the applause starts before the curtain rises. The story here is conductor Riccardo Muti’s long-delayed debut at the Met (he’s 69), not necessarily the...
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Please Stop Coloring
I did some exasperated tweeting last week when I saw the new citrus Hans Wegner wishbone chairs on Design*Sponge.
What would Hans Wegner say? http://bit.ly/9PXack Anyone else hate recolored classics too? They had paint in 1950, he chose not to use it.
Sam Grawe at Dwell then alerted me to a number of other outrages to mid-century classics, including the green stain on the Eames LCW, and the...
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What I Learned @dcritconference
The D-Crit Conference is just a memory, so I shouldn’t even be posting this, right? Except, if there’s anything the conference should have taught its participants and audience members, it is that design and criticism take time. As a tribute to the afternoon presentations I saw (really, never been less bored at a conference) I offer terse tribute. I hope the new MFAs will take it in...
