September 2010
13 posts
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This is a thrill...
Design Research, the book and the store, in T. Hard copy this weekend, with bonus profile written by me of the amazing German toy designer Renate Muller (who is so D/R). More on that later.
Pilar Viladas writes:
In their prologue, the authors characterize Design Research as ‘‘a warm, eclectic, colorful and international version of modernism, one that mixed folk art and Mies van der Rohe,...
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Yummy!
I thoroughly enjoyed the exhibition Appetite, curated by Alexander Tochilovsky at the Herb Lubalin Center at Cooper Union, not least because it was bite-sized. One room, lots of mouth-watering artifacts, and a number of untold stories. My favorite: that black-and-white grocery sticker on almost every item you buy at the Met has a typeface, Hobo, designed in 1910.
Also appealing was the capsule...
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Masdar: So Many Questions
So Nicolai heads out of town in order to find a sustainable city, and returns questioning the nature of utopia, suburbia, and Manhattan.
And yet Masdar seems like the fulfillment of that idea. Ever since the notion that thoughtful planning could improve the lot of humankind died out, sometime in the 1970s, both the megarich and the educated middle classes have increasingly found solace by...
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Rendering v. Reality in Sukkah City
I was not planning to post anything about Sukkah City. I attended the post-tornado preview and was underwhelmed by the five sukkahs on display that night, already concerned that they had not been designed for the great outdoors. And the collapse of P.YGROS.C en route, one of the most technically interesting (if derivative of this lamp) seemed to prove me right. It all just looked like an...
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The Still-Expanding Airport
Drawing from the MoMA Collection, gift of Aline Saarinen.
In 1958, after some failed attempts by the Saarinen office to make a stop-motion film of their model for Dulles Airport, Eero Saarinen called upon his old friend Charles Eames to help him out. The office had spent months researching the new jet airport, and had come to a number of conclusions about how best to connect people and planes....
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Shall I Complain About the New Yorker?
I know, I always do. But this week is the Style issue, which means they suddenly discover the world of design, and there were two howlers in the profiles of James Dyson and Mickey Drexler (and please, does every magazine need to fawn over him and/or Jenna Lyons? I have seen her navy kid’s room 100 times now. And I think J.Crew quality sucks).
The first was this:
In engineering his...
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NYT Opinionator: If These Walls Could Talk
For the second time in as many weeks, this blog has made the big time (i.e. publication). A post I wrote last winter about the ABC TV show Modern Family developed into my third and likely final entry in the New York Times Opinionator series Living Rooms: If These Walls Could Talk.
The show, produced by Steven Levitan and Christopher Lloyd, is about three intertwined families living in the Los...
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My Franzen, Freedom Review
PP 3-26: Brilliant. Published in the New Yorker last year as “Good Neighbors,” Freedom’s first chapter shows the kind of controlled, acid description of family that won Franzen many fans. As I wrote last year after I read the story,
Good Neighbors is delightful. It may be a 300 page novel compressed into five New Yorker spreads, but that just concentrates the delicious ...
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Make It Bigger
I was in Cambridge over Labor Day, and stopped on Brattle Street to see the latest inhabitant of the Design Research Headquarters (Crate & Barrel decamped in 2008): Anthropologie. On the surface I thought Anthro was a good fit for the building. Like Ben Thompson’s D/R, it is a retailer deeply invested in display, with a consistent aesthetic that spreads from clothing to housewares to...
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An Honor Just to be Mentioned...
… in the same headline as my absolute favorite novelists, Edith Wharton and Jane Austen, by Jillian Burt of Editions B on the Huffington Post. In Alexandra Lange and Rosanne Cash, Heirs to Edith Wharton and Jane Austen (can’t really believe this headline exists), Burt shows herself to be a close reader of my writing, and makes me feel like I might not be so far from writing the...
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In Dwell: Hands Off the Icons
In the October 2010 issue of Dwell, which celebrates the magazine’s tenth anniversary by revisiting its own (generally happy) homeowners, I offer the following Argument. It will be familiar to faithful readers of this blog, or my Tweets. But it shows what a little time, second thoughts, and an editor can do.
“What would Hans Wegner say?” I tweeted upon seeing a citrus-colored Wishbone...
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Coming to the V&A: Tower of Power
A little scary, right? I’m not sure whether to critique the building, the checked suit, or the 1980s absence of Photoshop on the age spots. But it is not often that a museum blogs about Postmodernism, Michael Sorkin (one of the great take-downs) and credits the (female) renderer who made the AT&T Building look the best it ever has.
Even before the building was completed, it was...
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Kitchen Godjets
Bad form to apologize for not posting. But it is the lightest news week of the year! All this coverage of Barack Obama’s office! The psychologists-cum-decorators in the NYT Home section “analysis” of the new rug are creeping me out. And Dominique Browning says what I would have said, had I been asked:
Dominique Browning
Former editor in chief, House & Garden.
All those...
