Visit: Scandinavian Design Preview
On May 8 Wright20 will hold an auction of Scandinavian modern design in Chicago. Until then, you can visit a selection of rugs, boards, chairs and credenzas at 980 Madison in Manhattan. My covet is the Marta Maas-Fjetterstrom carpets, with their delicate color combinations and intricate geometries.
Wednesday Links: 4.16.14
Courtesy Renzo Piano Building Workshop/Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences
Mid-century modern houses as an endangered species in Architectural Record. Sad how little has changed since I wrote on the same topic for Metropolis in 2003.
A Star Wars creature? The IBM Pavilion at the 1964 World’s Fair? What does Renzo Piano and Zoltan Pali’s Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ planned film museum most resemble, besides a mistake?
You may never get to fly first class, but you’ll still enjoy David Owen’s New Yorker feature on James Park Associates and the aesthetics and mechanics of jet comfort.
When Melbourne learned from Las Vegas. Great article on the legacy of postmodernism Down Under. I thought as much when I visited last spring.
Archipsychogeography
n. The city in the critic’s mind made entirely of out-of-date and never built project renderings.
Inspired by.
Shopping the Past: Aluminum in Modern Architecture
While in the historic town of Micanopy, FL this weekend I got to visit the soon-to-close O. Brisky Books. In the Architecture section I found not only Ada Louise Huxtable’s Kicked A Building Lately? (my favorite book title ever) but the two-volume set of Aluminum in Modern Architecture, published in 1956 with funding from Reynolds Metals. Metals companies clearly understood the power of design to sell their products during this period; Alcoa also sponsored many metal showcases.
Vol. 1 is a trove of projects famous (General Motors Technical Center) and unknown, at least to me (the Zurich airport). I paid $10 for the set, sadly lacking its original aluminum slipcase.
Cloverleaf
I’ve been noticing the track show up in a lot of landscape projects. Now it seems to be entering the building.
Jane Thompson's Calder Brooch
On Wednesday, I hosted a conversation with Jane Thompson about her Zelig-like modernist career at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Jane covered her time at the Museum of Modern Art, where she was docent at Marcel Breuer’s House in the Museum Garden, her editorial choices at I.D. Magazine (RIP), her involvement with pioneering store Design Research, and her fight to save Faneuil Hall, which transformed it into one of the nation’s ongoing top 10 tourist attractions.
Many in the audience noticed Jane’s spiral brooch. She explained that while she worked at MoMA in the late 1940s, she admired Mary Barnes’s collection of jewelry by “Sandy” Calder. One day she asked him if he would make her something. He drew a spiral on a piece of paper and a few weeks later, this pin arrived in the mail with the note that she owed him $25. “A whole week’s pay!”
Lucia Eames, 1930-2014
Misha Gravenor for Metropolis Magazine
I never met Lucia Eames, but I always think of her as she appeared in the 1976 short film “The Chase,” a demonstration piece for the Polavision Instant Home Movie System. Of course an Eames home movie would have more style than anyone else’s. In the film, Lucia, looking like the Radcliffe graduate she was with glasses, long straight hair, and a denim skirt, is quietly reading on a blanket. The camera pans to a red leather diary, moments before a little boy with a blond bowl cut snatches it and runs away. She gives chase, following him into the Eames House, up the spiral staircase, out the upper story window, and up the Pacific Palisades bluff into which the house is set. In an instant you understand the section of the house, its tight spaces and two levels, its simple frame and idiosyncratic moments. Lucia and the boy are playing with the house and its site, revealing it though motion. One imagines Lucia’s children must often have been called upon to play, whether with toys, furniture, or Hang-It-Alls. She could, and did explain the point of her parents’ work through the simple step of living with it.
Monday Links: 4.7.14
BIG's 'Reverse Aquarium,' courtesy Rebuild By Design
We’re not in Manhattan anymore. New York Mayor Bill de Blasio appoints Tom Finkelpearl, president and executive director of the Queens Museum, as his commissioner of cultural affairs, emphasizing Finkelpearl’s outer-borough activities and emphasis on art for everyone in rhetoric strikingly similar to that used for his appointment of Parks Commissioner Mitchell Silver.
The Indiana Jones of architectural photography? The Wall Street Journal claims Iwan Baan is the profession’s kingmaker, as image trumps all.
Do not touch doesn’t have to mean hands-off: A primer for parents on interacting with museum exhibitions without buttons and lights.
Bjarke Ingels saves Manhattan with BIG U, a protective, landscaped and self-branded berm with parts that could rise up and flip down from Central Park South. See this and nine other resilient regional proposals at Rebuild By Design.
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