Illustration by Viktor Hachmang.

For the new Eames Institute publication Kazam! I trace the history of a chair-making machine.

It was Ray Eames, with her typical flair, who nicknamed the machine Kazam! after the sorcerer’s incantation alakazam, because it could form bent plywood “like magic.” This couldn’t have been farther from the truth. The Kazam! made complex curves out of flat planes through hard work—physical, mental, electrical—as Ray and Charles Eames never gave up on the idea that plywood could bend in multiple directions to better cradle the human body and harness industrial innovation in service of value. The Kazam! and the bestselling series of chairs that were its eventual commercial offspring serve as an ideal illustration of the practical magic the Eameses and their collaborators brought to a task. Those chairs also underline the many humble handmade and hand-finished attempts required to produce the seemingly hands-free designs that have become modern pin-ups. “The problem of designing anything is in a sense the problem of designing a tool,” the Eameses wrote in 1953. To make a mass-produced molded plywood chair, then, the key was to invent the tools to create the tool.

Illustration by Nicholas Konrad.

When Sophie Fader and Simone Paasche founded their jewelry-renovation business, Spur Jewelry, in 2018, they imagined it as a concierge service where they would go to clients’ houses, spend an hour combing through their treasure boxes, and envision something new with the gems and gold. “A lot of people our age [millennials], baby boomers too, are inheriting all of this jewelry from their parents and grandparents, but the styles are outdated,” Fader told me. “Many rings are set very high off the hand, and today, with women working and having hands-on jobs,” she said, those rings catch and scratch.

Fader and Paasche had set up their own business to be hands-on, and, when the pandemic hit in early 2020, all those in-person home visits disappeared. Thanks to guidance from Fader’s mother, who works in Columbia University’s Department of Epidemiology, they knew that covid was going to be more than a short-term problem. The solution, from a business perspective, was to take their process online: fifteen-minute phone appointments to look through uploaded photos, a retooled Web site, Facebook ads, FedEx. They also revamped their Instagram to show what they could do in as few frames as possible: “Before-and-afters. It seems incredibly simple,” Fader said.

Most visitors to the North Face store on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan are looking for a parka. But several times a month, while working the door, manager Lucas Gustin spots people who don’t fit the brand’s usual demographic: “They are well-dressed, older,” he says. “They usually come in couples too. I’ll think to myself, OK, they are in here for the Bertoia.”

“The Bertoia” is sculptor Harry Bertoia’s largest extant U.S. work, a 70-foot-long, 16-foot-high steel screen, made of staggered golden rectangles interspersed with abstract forms resembling leaves and birds. It was specially commissioned by architect Gordon Bunshaft of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill for 510 Fifth Avenue’s original tenant, Manufacturers Trust. It presides over the second floor of the building, once the primary banking hall, filling the eye as you travel up the east-west escalators. When the building opened in 1954, critic Ada Louise Huxtable noted the sculpture’s “Byzantine splendor,” while critic Lewis Mumford wrote that “it humanizes these quarters,” contrasting with the building’s cool metal, marble and grids. “It suggests something frail, incomplete … and thus lovable.” (A landmarks battle in 2011 mandated the screen’s return after renovations.)

That outerwear shoppers should have access to such grandeur may seem like a liability, but Gustin insists it is no trouble. A modest blond wood plaque, located at the north end of the screen, identifies the artist. “Little kids are always running around and they don’t touch it,” he says. “It is boldly silent.”

Illustration by Cathryn Virginia.

The narrow stretch that separates Quay Tower from a thatch of bamboo and oaks in Brooklyn Bridge Park doesn’t look like much, especially in winter. Unless you’re a bird.

To a bird, the copper-colored building’s glass is a mirror, reflecting the thick grove of trees and suggesting that the wilderness continues across the road. To a bird, that can be a deadly mistake.

“You see that reflection? To a bird that looks like a tree, that is a tree, and they will go right for the tree,” says Catherine Quayle, social media director at the Wild Bird Fund.

The surprising uptake of birding as a pandemic hobby, along with social media and data collection tools like eBird and dBird, has created new visibility for bird collisions with glass, which kill as many as 1 billion birds in the U.S. per year. At the same time, a new generation of urban parks has given birds more places to roost in highly populated areas. But something else has followed these parks as well: real estate capital. The vogue for urban parks creates more economic impetus to build shiny buildings with big windows opposite those urban wetlands, glades and groves.

Architects have known how to prevent their buildings from becoming bird killers for more than a decade: Toronto was the first North American municipality to implement bird safety building guidelines back in 2010. New York City implemented some laws of its own in 2021. Patterned glass, exterior screens and turning the lights off at night can all significantly reduce bird deaths. But those standards clash with the big glass and big views that clients associate with big money.

By Alexandra Lange and Mark Lamster

We’ve been doing this for twelve years now, and this was, without question, the hardest it’s ever been to come up with these “awards.” The year was grim from the start, and architecture was deeply implicated. It kicked off in January with the desecration of the Capitol, in June we had the catastrophic collapse of the Surfside condo tower, in August the Vessel closed after a fourth suicide, September brought the twentieth anniversary of 9/11, and through it all the pandemic has marched its way through the Greek alphabet. So yeah, it’s been a rough twelve months.

But it is the holiday season, a time for cheer, and we’re back with our review of the best and worst in architecture and design for 2021. And so … on to the fake prizes!

Is There Any Damn Place to Sit Down Here Award? To Diller’s Folly, a.k.a. Golf Tee Island, a.k.a. Little Island. The thing cost $250m and there’s not a bench in shade to be found. But lord is there a lot of fencing.

Design by Kovac Design Studio. Photo by Roger Davies.

Did we mention the 5,000-square-foot sun shade?

What does it take to make a getaway truly relaxing? For some people, it’s communing with nature. For other travelers, it’s spa services. For weekenders, it can be a home away from home. For Todd Feldman, a film and television agent at Creative Artists Agency, it was not having to choose. His seven-bedroom, 9,200-square-foot vacation house at the private Madison Club in La Quinta, California, designed by Kovac Design Studio and completed in 2020, is Palm Springs pad as boutique hotel, with Mad Men flourishes and a museum-worthy outdoor canopy, a bar ready for Out of Sight–level seduction, and a concession stand stocked for Fight Night.

“Often, when you’re lucky enough to be invited to someone’s place, there is that little bit of awkwardness,” Feldman says. “You get up in the morning, and if you are an early riser like I am, you’re standing there by the coffee machine and you haven’t yet brushed your teeth. Or even when you’re having a great night, some people want to go to bed a little earlier. There’s a push-pull.”