July 2010
14 posts
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On DO: Lunch with the Critics
On vacation someplace green, so I can’t go on at length, but please weigh in on Mark Lamster and my new Design Observer feature, Lunch with the Critics. First stop: the new Lincoln Center.
First impression: awkward. Did you not just almost come to blows with the waitress because the lobby lacks hierarchy and a clear sense of circulation? Same problem with the ditch outside. You thought...
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Culture War Begins at Home
Odd thing about being in the New York Times: a) everyone sees your story and b) everyone sees your story. I got this polite but slightly alarming email in response to my Opinionator piece Easier Living, By Design, on the influence of Mary and Russel Wright.
One of my favorite periods is the Craftsman period that seems to be confined to our country. What came after that is by my impression...
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Archpaper Review: Our Cities Ourselves
Does one size fit all, even when it is oh-so-hot bikes and buses? I wonder, in The Architect’s Newspaper, about the solutions proposed in the Center for Architecture’s Our Cities Ourselves.
What was also disconcerting is the sameness of the strategies. Bus Rapid Transit, the transport fix on everyone’s lips, is the major player, linking backwaters to centers, creating transit...
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NYT Opinionator: Easier Living Through Design
The first of my three planned posts for the New York Times Opinionator blog’s Living Rooms series went live today. It is my take on the domestic predictions of Mary and Russel Wright, whose 1950 “Guide to Easier Living” is well worth a read. Fabulous layout and illustrations. You can also tour Russel’s amazing house, Dragon Rock, until October.
The easier living...
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Culture Shed: Where's the Neighborhood?
CultureGrrl offers a critique of the NEA grant for Culture Shed, the Diller Scofidio + Renfro and Rockwell Group design for a Kunsthalle with retractable roofs over at Hudson Yards.
I regard this as an inappropriate diversion of federal art funds. NEA grants should appropriately go to the new facility’s cultural programming, if and when it’s actually up and running, but not...
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Hung Ceilings: Mystery Solved
Mark Lamster thought that was the Daily News Building behind Don, and I had to agree. Through the wonders of Google maps, I see 300 East 42nd Street, built in 1963 and designed by William Lescaze is a glass curtain-wall building directly across the street. I’m going to try to find an interior photo, since 300 still has opaque spandrels, which is what most of the 1960s curtain wall...
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Hung Ceilings
Mad Men returneth! I am as excited as the next design geek, but must say all of the preview coverage has been deeply dispiriting. Alessandra Stanley had a few tidbits about where we’ll be after the falling man on July 25 (1964), but nothing new to say about the show. Steve Heller rehashed George Lois’s complaints of inaccuracy (look, we know the people on TV are better looking and...
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Time to Move On
Here’s a very nice house in Montauk. It looks just like that very nice house I saw a few months ago on Shelter Island. Or that other nice house in Aspen my husband worked on a few years ago.
Glass first floor, check. Floating staircase, check. Feature fireplace, check. Pocket doors, check. Brand-new mid-century modern furniture, check. Quote about loving the indoor-outdoor life, check.
...
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Up in the Air
Driving north on the FDR Drive this weekend, I saw again from the slow spot just before Waterside Plaza (definitely not ugly) the twin spires of Times Square, One Bryant Park and 4 Times Square. They were rather indistinct against the haze, because both stabs at tallest status devolve into an array of openwork struts as they reach their peak. If you didn’t know the skyscraper below...
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Heavens
Very very late in both cases, but after being stuck in sticky Brooklyn in my own house for weeks, I feel I finally managed to visit back-to-back versions of my idea of heaven.
The first was filmic: A Single Man, Tom Ford’s tribute to 1960s style (those dreamy narrow lapels) and the past invisibility of gay love, spends enough time on the details of John Lautner’s 1949 Schaffer...
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Out of Love with Piano
Reading Martin Filler’s review of Renzo Piano’s proposed addition to the Kimbell Museum in Fort Worth, considered Louis Kahn’s masterpiece, and one of the museums to beat worldwide, I was struck again by how Piano’s critical reception seems to have curdled. Sure, Nicolai Ouroussoff called him overly respectful years ago at the Whitney, clearly preferring Rem...
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Below Black Rock
The plaza around the CBS Building in Manhattan has always seemed perverse. Eero Saarinen designed it to set off his only skyscraper, which he wanted to be as much one thing (“a proud and soaring thing,” to adopt Louis Sullivan’s terminology) as possible. Since Mies had already used a few steps up at the Seagram Building over on Park, Saarinen thought he would use a few steps...
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The Personality of Parks
Until Pier 6 at Brooklyn Bridge Park opened, my only experience of parks as a parent had been of neighborhood parks. The sandbox, the little house, the frog park, as my son calls them, in eternal morning and afternoon rotation. Occasionally Carroll Park, but I found that to be too much of a scene. Sometimes a jaunt to Pierrepont or Chapin in Brooklyn Heights, where I often discovered other...
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Fix the Car Seat
Last week Tom Vanderbilt posted a photo of the Kiddee Drivette on his How We Drive blog, a product from the good old days when kids rode up front, had their own “not noisy” horns, and were restrained with one small woven strap. Heck, my mother spent her early years in the back of a Jeep so primitive my grandmother had to open the door to indicate turns with her arm.
But what...
