via Mrs. Easton
I already Tweeted this, but I am looking for people who collect and use vintage cookware: Dansk, Copco, Descoware, and many, many rainbow-colored additional options. If you are one of those people and would like to talk about it for a Gourmet piece, leave a comment or message me @LangeAlexandra.
All houses have a story. This house has a saga. Call it the Three Ages of Architecture: modern, postmodern, and contemporary. The end result is a 4,600-square-foot house with six bedrooms, a home office, and a playroom, its upper story cantilevered over a picturesque Westchester County ravine. In the summer, from the road, the house seems to float in the trees—unlike its hulking neighbors. But it took the work of two sets of determined architects, first in 1958 and then in 2010, to make it look this easy.
Read the rest of my story on the Rado House at Metropolis.
Elizabeth Taylor with baby daughter Liza Todd on the cover of Life, 1957.
Much less airbrushing of babies in the 1950s. Much more eyeshadow on new moms.
1950s Dorothy Gray lipstick advertisement.
My grandmother worked for Dorothy Gray in the 1940s, designing packaging and even tiny soaps shaped like corsets. I wonder if there are any ads featuring those…
Elroy Webber, Kuzon House, Longmeadow, MA; Ezra Stoller/ESTO
I went to Gary Hustwit’s lecture last night at D-Crit (next Tuesday: David Barringer) and he teased the third film in his design trilogy (after Helvetica, Objectified). Topic TBA next week, one assumes via Twitter.
Being at D-Crit, and seeing all the second-year students reminded me that I have yet to highlight the upcoming D-Crit Conference on April 30. All 15 future holders of an MFA in Design Criticism will present short thesis talks. Kurt Andersen will moderate. John Thackara and Peter Hall will keynote. But I am more excited to hear the students, as I have been privy to glimpses of their research over the past year plus, and it is all quirky and topical and fascinating.
I can’t pick favorites, but there are a few topics that are near and dear to my heart, as will be obvious if you have been reading this blog. Sarah Froelich has uncovered the unwritten history of Dansk, an American company with a Danish designer, concocted to capitalize on the vogue for Scandinavian modern in the 1950s. My grandmother still makes her scalloped potatoes in a large blue Kobenstyle banquet server, and I have started my own collection. Closer to home, Emily Leibin discovered Connecticut modern architect Elroy Webber, whose mid-century houses combine indoor-outdoor living with some very zippy stripes (see above). Angela Riechers has curated a collection of personal memorial objects, ranging from hair brooches to portrait tattoos, widows weeds to diamonds made of a beloved’s ashes. It is creepy and spooky, and makes you think about forever. Katie Henderson has done the critique of Wes Anderson the New Yorker failed to do, writing about Anderson’s production design and the family dynamic. If the film critics fail to notice the decor, that’s where design critics step in.
And there’s lots more: car-sharing, Brazilian contemporary design, movie theaters, Godard… Please come.
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 blue-flowered china. “Don’t hate me, but I love this pattern,” she says. Bill gets a look of wonder. “That was my grandmother’s pattern.” There is a pause for significance. Clerk asks, “How many place settings should I put you down for?” “Ten,” they reply in unison.
This scene stuck with me for ten years, 1993 to 2003, when I duly registered for 10 place settings. Of course, my premarital taste summit took place at Moss, where blue rosettes are banished. All our choices were white. And I did not throw my fiance over for Tom Hanks. Not with that hair.
But the scene, and the movie’s rejection of the idea that shared taste = true love made me think again about the topic of taste. I am looking for a book idea that is bigger than just architecture, and taste is the topic I keep returning to in my mind. Where does taste come from? Is it hereditary? And why are its practitioners so slippery to describe? All the architects I am interested in turn out to really be tastemakers, top-quality designers that were able to put aside their own egos and showcase the work of others.
Ben Thompson, first and foremost, created D/R as a sort of dream version of his own home, filled with everything he would have bought for himself. He and his team designed furniture, but it was mostly in the manner of “fill-in pieces”, the phrase Florence Knoll used to describe the particular genius of her rectilinear sofas and credenzas. Thompson’s pieces were chunkier, many designed as dorm furniture, but the work of both needs Bertoia sculptures, Noguchi lamps, fuzzy pillows, rugs or dogs to come alive. Alexander Girard too provided the structure in shops, exhibitions, his own house, for folk art and letters and plows to shine.
As I have journeyed back in time as a historian I keep encountering the origins of my own taste too. For this currently inchoate book to work, I think I would need a bit of memoir, from my grandparents’ building of their own modern house in the woods, in the late 1940s, to my Cambridge childhood with big paper lanterns, to designing my own house, with more paper lanterns, and a Girard sofa, and a Koenig kitchen. Those encounters can be a shock. The most recent: in the catalog for Girard’s amazing 1949 show An Exhibition for Modern Living, my silver pattern, Towle Craftsman. I felt like Girard and I had gone to Tiffany together and answered, “Ten.”
The truth isn’t that far off. While researching my dissertation, I had lunch with a number of former employees of Connecticut General, arranged by Vassar professor Nicholas Adams. I loved the feel of my fork so much I surreptitiously turned it over to peek at the pattern name. Towle Craftsman. The lunch was at the home of the daughter and son-in-law of one of the employees, and I have to believe the parents had bought the silver. My theory of taste is that it is environmental. After you had worked in Bunshaft’s glorious building, wouldn’t you start to see things in a modern way? Your eye would become Girard’s eye, as mine has. And that would seem to be the only pattern possible.
When you go to the Museum of the City of New York to see the Eero Saarinen show (as you must: stop to watch the film of Aline Saarinen on the Today show talking about TWA, and the final triangular section being inserted into the St. Louis Arch), be sure to go upstairs. Tucked away in the south side of the second floor is the show Only In New York: Photographs from Look Magazine a small exhibit that could have been a lot bigger, showcasing Gardner Cowles Jr.’s picture magazine’s vision of the city from the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. (There’s even a connection between the two shows, via Florence Knoll, who designed the Look offices.) There’s a lot of excellent photography, as well as the oscillation between the witty and the gritty that I associate with New York Magazine.
Times Square showgirls, socialites and top models all get warts-and-all treatment very different from the icy imagery I associate with beauty at the time (the very image Betty Draper is always trying to live up to on Mad Men). There’s a very clever portrait of MoMA director Rene d’Harnoncourt, master of all the miniature modern icons he surveys (Matisse, white china, that ball bearing from the first Industrial Design exhibit). And the photo above, a counterpart to the one snapped at the Beaux Arts Ball of 1931, where the architects of the Chrysler Building, the Waldorf-Astoria, the Museum of the City of New York and others dressed as their famous creations. Look simply had the architects stand behind shimmering cut-outs of their buildings in 1957—that’s Gordon Bunshaft on the far left, with Lever House; Ely Jacques Kahn appears in both photos.
In 2003, which now feels like a lifetime ago, my now-husband and I embarked upon a three-week modern architecture tour of the Midwest. Most of the sites on our list were topics for my dissertation, but the others were not incidental: to truly understand the history of modernism in the United States, you have to get off the coasts. Our roughly circular trip took us from New York to Pittsburgh (Wright, Harrison), Detroit [Saarinen, Saarinen, Mies (image from Dwell above)], Zeeland (Nelson, Eames, Girard), Chicago (Mies), Racine (Wright), Spring Green (Wright), Moline (Saarinen), St. Louis (Saarinen, Sullivan), Bartlesville (Wright), Columbus, IN (Saarinen, Saarinen, Noyes, Weese), and some other places I am sure we have forgotten. At the General Motors Technical Center we were the only foreign car in the lot; in Zeeland, a dry town, the only restaurant seemed to be Boston Market and the Herman Miller archivist couldn’t believe we lived blocks from the location of his favorite film, Moonstruck; when we got out of the movies in Tulsa at 9 p.m. the vast mall parking lot was empty but for our car. It was a strange trip, mostly strange because, except at the Wright sites, we seemed to be the only people interested in the buildings. I have written about the private proximities of major postwar designers like Noyes and Knoll and Saarinen, and about the corporate proximities of the same, but I never thought to rearrange the names and careers geographically.
I was reminded of this trip by the discovery of the website Michigan Modern (which subsequently posted a link to my Design Observer piece on Aline and Eero Saarinen, Love & Architecture), the online front for a just-launched project by the State Historic Preservation Office intended to highlight the many modern architects and buildings in Michigan. Examples are thick on the ground, with loci of invention in Detroit (and suburbs like Bloomfield Hills and Grosse Pointe) and Zeeland (home of Herman Miller, and close to furniture town Grand Rapids). Cranbrook, the Bauhaus-like academy of art and design founded by auto entrepreneur George Booth and run by Eliel Saarinen, was a node in what became an international design network of teachers, students, and alumni. At one point, of a cold Michigan evening, you could find yourself at a party with Charles Eames, Eero Saarinen, Alexander Girard and Minoru Yamasaki, men who defined postwar architecture and design from what was then a booming city. Everyone seemed to have a bentwood chair in his backseat, or a skyscraper based on a new structural system on the drawing board. And Girard’s pioneering 1949 exhibition at the Detroit Institute of Arts, “For Modern Living” brought all of these people and more together for the first time.
Everyone knows that Los Angeles—to which Charles and Ray Eames soon decamped—and New York—where the Museum of Modern Art created its own design society, were style centers, but other cities and other states certainly had their moments (Kansas City, where the Halls of Hallmark decided to remake the downtown in the 1960s, certainly comes to mind), much as other cities and other states are now at the forefront of thinking about green living, sustainability, affordability. I hope Michigan Modern inspires other states to get excited about their more recent heritage as a matter of American history and preservation. It is all very well for the media, and out-of-state historians, to try to tell a city what they are trying to tear down, but it is much better to have locals retrace the intertwined histories of industry, innovation and (oftentimes) suburbanization for themselves. The results will be less formal, and closer to the scrappy, personal culture that spawned the icons.
