August 2010
13 posts
4 tags
Lunch with the Critics: Park51 and 15 Penn Plaza
Quick post to say that the transcript of my second critical lunch with Mark Lamster, in the creepy climes of the Hotel Pennsylvania, has been posted on Design Observer. We discuss the urbanism, politics and skyline posturing of Park51 and 15 Penn Plaza.
A sample:
AL: The rendering of 15 Penn Plaza that really flabbergasted me was the one showing it in context — the context of a built-out...
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NYT Opinionator: What's Cooking in Kitchen Design?
Second of my three installments for the New York Times Living Rooms series, this one on kitchens: What’s Cooking in Kitchen Design?
So how did we go from efficiency to entertainment? In “Mad Men,” Betty Draper has wall ovens and a stove-top island, both desirable today; the differences are the brown plaid wallpaper and cabinets made from dowdy knotted pine. In other words, what felt...
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The War at Home
My brother Jeremy M. Lange is a photojournalist who works for the Independent, in Durham, NC, and also strings for the Times. He has spent the last several years working on a series, The War at Home, whose title is fairly self-explanatory. North Carolina is a state with a huge military presence, and he has been able to photograph a number of funerals, with family permission every time.
This...
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This is a Terrible Poster
I saw the poster for the Facebook movie, The Social Network, at the Bergen Street station yesterday. And all I could think was, This is a terrible poster. Now I can’t find the subway version online (camera phone FAIL), but mentally replace the text above with the three words Punk, Billionaire, Genius. And take away the cute Facebook sidebar.
Crypto-Kruger typography, with lightweight...
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The Language of "Kids Are All Right"
Finally escaped my house of an evening Saturday night and saw The Kids Are All Right. Which I loved. The dinner table conversations were right on. The acting was great. I loved seeing Julianne Moore’s freckles and Annette Bening’s wrinkles. And the language—of therapy, of cool-kid professions, even of landscape design—was a 2010 time capsule. The decor was nice too.
I...
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D/R, Back in the Boston Globe
Robert Campbell, the Boston Globe’s architecture critic, takes a look at Design Research: The Store That Brought Modern Living to American Homes and declares that Cambridge lived the modern life first.
Actually, it was Cambridge half a century ago when a Brattle Street emporium sparked an American revolution in domestic taste.
A new book, just off the presses, recalls that era:...
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The Imperfect Imperfectionists
Since, way back in the 1990s, I got to read all the new fiction I wanted for free (i.e. I was the assistant to the book review editor at New York Magazine) I have a real hang-up when it comes to buying new books. What that means is I often read no books, since I like to consume fresh media, and the New Yorker is always drifting on my bedside table. Last week I felt disgusted with myself for...
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On DO: When Shopping Was Sociable
What do Design Research, the Apple stores and the Brooklyn Flea have in common? Read my latest essay on Design Observer to find out.
D/R’s founder, architect Benjamin Thompson, wanted to turn shopping into less of a chore, more of a creative enterprise. Thompson wrote in the Boston Globe in 1971, 18 months after his glass-walled, concrete-framed new D/R headquarters opened in Cambridge:...
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Modern Houses and Doomed P.M.s
We watched The Ghost Writer, Roman Polanski’s recent thriller starring Ewan McGregor in the in-over-his-head male ingenue role. I loved the first hour—making the rude ballet of getting on and off a car ferry into a scene of menace was genius—but when it became clear the bad guys were part of (and this is no spoiler) A VAST INTERNATIONAL CONSPIRACY I lost interest. Two things...
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Damned Icons
I just think it’s damned anyway. I don’t know if any amount of preservation lobbying would make a difference, and I don’t know what the argument would be. What are they going to do with another structure there with no assigned use? They’ve already got that with TWA.
That’s John Morris Dixon, former Progressive Architecture editor and chronicler of the best of mid-century corporate...
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Simple Pleasures
I took my son to the Imagination Playground yesterday, at Burling Slip. All the press, and most of the photos, have emphasized architect David Rockwell’s movable blue foam blocks, designed to put the free play back in playground, along with the fact that the park would be staffed by “facilitators” to enhance its educational function. Somehow I imagined it as a stage for...
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Mid-C Decor Striptease
Don’t you love that Matthew Weiner is now teasing us—on Mad Men, of course, what else—with period decor? What was last night’s episode, for design types, but a long, slow journey toward what promised to be the big reveal: Acapulco, New Year’s Eve, 1964. I was practically decorating it in my head, Mexican beauties in yellow and turquoise and bouffants, Don on a deck...
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Design Research (the book) Has Landed
Design Research: The Store That Brought Modern Living to American Homes, by Jane Thompson and me, has finally arrived. To whet your appetite for its many charms, a slideshow at Co. featuring 11 of the hundreds of design icons Ben Thompson brought together and sold to to an admiring public at the iconic Cambridge, New York and San Francisco stores.
Marimekko dresses D/R’s biggest claim to...
