It sometimes feels as if no aspect of American midcentury modern design has been left unconsidered, unexhibited, unreissued. But there is undiscovered territory. You’re sitting on it.
My latest for T on Knoll Textiles, 1945-2010. Read the rest here, or in the magazine this weekend.
(via High Fiber - NYTimes.com)
A few weeks ago Mark Lamster explored the future of the architectural monograph. Here Alexandra Lange takes up the topic, arguing that the new monograph by Studio Gang is a very contemporary effort to negotiate the temptations and contradictions of the genre: to feed the star machinery and yet resist it at the same time.
Read my take on Studio Gang’s first book, Reveal, here.
Related: Fast Company Co. blog on Studio Gang’s Bruce Mau-designed website. Images of the Gang office (showing non-blurry people) in Architect.
For many American architects, their first commission is a house. Even if they go on to fame and fortune and skyscrapers, what people think of first, when they hear the name, is that house. Eero Saarinen grew up in two houses designed by his father Eliel, first Hvittrask (1901-03) in Finland, then the Saarinen House (1928-30) at Cranbrook. The Saarinen House became, like the Cranbrook and Kingswood school buildings, a family project. Mother Loja Saarinen created fabrics and rugs and collaborated on the garden. Eero designed furniture for his parents’ bedroom. Sister Pipsan designed motifs for the family’s bedroom doors. Eero himself has never been identified with a house. But that might be about to change.
On May 10, the J. Irwin and Xenia Miller House in Columbus, IN opens to the public for the first time since it was completed in 1958 (Video here). Designed by Saarinen and Kevin Roche, with interiors by Alexander Girard and gardens by Daniel Urban Kiley, the Miller House has been largely out of sight to the design world since its single publication in House & Garden in 1959. Xenia Miller lived there until her death in 2008, so what will be on display is the house as lived in and impeccably maintained by the Millers and their caretakers, a father and his son. Curators at the Indianapolis Museum of Art have cleaned, repaired and replaced, but dedicated themselves to working with what the Millers had left there, rather than trying to return it to 1958. Adding the Miller House to the list of iconic American modern houses suggests some new ideas about Saarinen and his collaborators, but also about for whom modern houses are designed. That Saarinen’s first homes were family affairs turns out not to be just a footnote.
Read the rest here.
I wrote about a new house in Chicago by Peter Gluck and Partners for April’s Architectural Digest. Slideshow here.Neighboring estates in this suburb of Chicago often announce their presence with showy turrets or columned façades, but Cascade House, a lakeside residence designed by New York architecture firm Peter Gluck and Partners, makes a more discreet impression. From its front drive, all one sees is a stack of two glass boxes: one transparent, one translucent. The rest of this home—true to its name—drops out of view, gently terracing down toward the waters of Lake Michigan.
I don’t know what to do with this book. The Story of Eames Furniture, by Marilyn Neuhart with John Neuhart (Gestalten, 2010), is a labor of love, a two-part, richly-illustrated history of some of the most famous modern chairs in the world. To reject it seems harsh. It contains fascinating tales of false starts and under-known design careers, what could be a separate book of clever mid-century magazine covers, furniture catalogs, and abstract photographic odes to mass-production. And yet I was unable to enjoy it. It is the kind of book that the design blogs love, picking out 10 fabulous images, glorying in its heft entirely in the abstract. Another chance to cite the Eameses! But as a real thing and as a work of history, it is less than the sum of its pages.
Read the rest at Design Observer.
Arts & Architecture, 1946: Eames plywood furniture.
On Change Observer today, my interview with Dan Wood of WORK Architecture Company, on his firm’s design for New York’s first Edible Schoolyard (now underway), the history of cities and food, and how Ebenezer Howard could be updated for the 21 Century.
If you ask a bunch of strangers to help you build an architectural folly, you are going to get architecture students. But if you ask a bunch of strangers to plant something you get ten times more than you ever wanted. Gardening is really exciting for people and creates a whole different kind of community spirit.
That’s one of the things we try to get across in the PF1 book. It started out as a project of ideas. It ended up a project about people. Everybody donated their thinking. That New York Times article came out and the next day Michael Grady Robertson, from the Queens County Farm, contacted us and said, “I am an organic farmer and I am in the city. Give me a call.” He was in the process of transforming that into a model sustainable farm. Two thirds of our plants were grown there.
Read the rest here.
Luckily for me, since I don’t own an iPad (or an iPhone, for that matter, which has begun to make me seem like a freak) my first story for GourmetLive is now online. When asked if there was anything to write about design and food this instantly came to mind.
Jam-making jams, fertilized grow pockets, edible schoolyards, skyscraper farms. Every day my Twitter feed, nominally devoted to design, architecture and media, brings me a stream of architectural platings. I see packaging that becomes a food bowl, sidewalks that sprout, bananas with logos. Right behind the question Why Design Now?—the theme of this year’s National Design Triennial—appears the question What to Eat Now? And designers seem to be throwing themselves at the answer for many of the same reasons. Now that we know we produce too much waste, now that aesthetics are suspect, now that we must compost or perish, how do design and architecture retool themselves for less, or better, or tastier consumption?
Well, we all have to eat.
Read the rest of The Architecture of Food here.
And since, as Khoi Vinh just pointed out, iPad apps aren’t linky. Let me provide some. The main projects I discuss aren’t brand new: Coolhaus, Edible Schoolyard New York, EATLACMA, Marije Vogelzang, but I felt no one had yet written about why such disparate design practices have taken up with food (and not just on GOOD). The short answer is, we all love it. Except for the parents with an unhealthy relationship to ice cream, juice and chocolate milk.
