Welcome Back, Overbite

A rare piece of good news from the modernist preservation wars: the Overbite lives! As Matt Chaban wrote in the New York Observer this week:

Many a preservationist lamented the demise of the Village’s O’Toole Building, the old National Maritime Union headquarters more commonly known as the Overbite Building for its unusual facade. After a three-year fight at the landmarks and city planning commissions, St. Vincent’s won begrudging approval to tear down the modernist structure and replace it with a new 21-story hospital tower.

When St. Vincent’s went bankrupt (the story was not a happy ending for everyone), its development partner, Rudin Management, turned to North Shore/LIJ to keep its multimillion dollar condo plan on the former hospital campus alive. Instead of building a new hospital—which never would have passed landmarks—North Shore/LIJ came up with a plan to repurpose the O’Toole Building, which won unanimous approval from the commission today.

In other words, even though the developer and previous hospital partner argued they couldn’t do anything with the building, faced with the current economic climate and opposition from the city and community, they found that, incredibly, they could. Remember this the next time a developer cries about how inability to change a landmark renders their investment moot. Why did you buy it, then?

The Uses of Cranks

Don’t worry, I’m not going to label everyone a closet architect. But this quote, from James Parker’s appreciation of Curb Your Enthusiasm in this month’s Atlantic, made me wonder if Larry David might not have been happier, his skills (such as they are) put to better use, as a product designer.

And still—this was the show’s hook—he burned. Still he grated. In so frictionless an environment, Larry was obliged to make his own friction—to become a one-man friction factory. Parts of him, or parts of his condition, we recognized from Seinfeld: his barking Costanzan indignation, his Krameroid manners. Dry cleaners were argued with. Waiters were made to feel awkward. Customs and conventions were submitted to a nonstop Seinfeldian interrogation: What is the cutoff time for late-night calls? How long must you stand at a graveside? Let me ask you a question … Let me ask you something … Let me ask you this …

Life itself, to be felt at all, had to be something like a rash. 

Jane Austen, Landscape Architect

After my last post on the uses of architecture in Austen, I got a lot of reading suggestions. The one that immediately piqued my interest was from Will Wiles, an editor at Icon and the author of the forthcoming Care of Wooden Floors, an architectural satire that sounds like the sort of archi-Austen comedy of manners I am always telling myself I should write. But he’s actually done it.

Making Dieter Rams

I reviewed Sophie Lovell’s new monograph, Dieter Rams: As Little As Possible (Phaidon) for The Architect’s Newspaper. For a Rams fan like me, this book is the ultimate, with every product put in a timeline and lovingly photographed. New photography by Florian Bohm even documents the archives (slideshow here), an indication of the project’s high fetishism. As I write in AN:

Open Dieter Rams: As Little Design as Possible. Turn to page 64. There you will find the Braun product line circa 1963. I would buy any one of those products today, save the cameras, were they sold in stores. Which is to say, you will get no argument from me about Rams’ greatness as an industrial designer and the superiority of his achievement as head of Braun’s product design department from 1961 to 1995, where he designed or co-designed 500 products, lighters, door handles, coffee grinders, hi-fis and televisions, hair dryers, and cameras. Plus those Vitsoe 606 shelves, still great, still in production.

But for a design historian, I found the book wanting in perspective and interpretation. It adds a great deal to our understanding of the team that made Rams’s long career at Braun possible, giving credit to the Braun brothers for embracing architectural modernism before they hired Rams, and identifying which famous products were in fact designed by members of his in-house design group. It goes in depth on the process and tactile moves made on a number of key products. But it never defines the Braun style in any deeper way.

Less but better

Dieter Rams: As Little Design As Possible by Sophie Lovell

Open Dieter Rams: As Little Design as Possible. Turn to page 64. There you will find the Braun product line circa 1963. I would buy any one of those products today, save the cameras, were they sold in stores. Which is to say, you will get no argument from me about Rams’ greatness as an industrial designer and the superiority of his achievement as head of Braun’s product design department from 1961 to 1995, where he designed or co-designed 500 products, lighters, door handles, coffee grinders, hi-fis and televisions, hair dryers, and cameras. Plus those Vitsoe 606 shelves, still great, still in production.

Would You Like Words With That?

Way back at Christmastime I assigned myself a blog post about all the social shopping sites: Polyvore, Thingd, Svpply, and so on, that let you share your taste in whatever with whomever in easily clickable form. I even went so far as to put together my own private good design for toys assortment as a form of positive criticism after I dissed the market for the wooden, the simple and the primary colored as being for parents rather than kids. (Since that story ran, my son has found a use for the Automoblox. He’s popped off all the wheels and arranges them as floor sculpture.)

But then I lost interest. I love stuff, not shopping, and these sites seemed to push sharing into the almost purely commercial realm. (Of course, you say, since they will only survive on advertising.) But I couldn’t help but think that there was something missing in all that white space. We are what we buy, but some of us still need a narrative.

Welcome to the Hall of Femmes

Last weekend I met Samira Bouabana and Angela Tillman Sperandio of Swedish design studio Hjärta Smärta, two designers who have decided, in the absence of other publishing on the topic, to start their own Hall of Femmes book series. The slim volumes, published by Oyster Press, include new interviews with a series of living female graphic design legends, plus surveys of their work. A public launch, sponsored by the Art Directors Club and the Consulate General of Sweden will be held tonight, June 28, 2011 at the ADC Gallery at 106 West 29th Street, New York.

Jane Austen, Architect?

Yesterday Twitter told me that Persuasion was the best of Jane Austen’s novels. This made me pause. Did I agree? Pride and Prejudice is my favorite, the one I re-read every year, the one quoted on my marriage certificate, the one I borrowed the VHS tapes of the BBC miniseries of and never returned. Couldn’t Elizabeth Bennet be an architecture critic? But yes, I thought, Persuasion is the best. It is sad. One has to consider whether one has also lost one’s bloom. But it has lovely people in it, and the climax is a scene of such suppressed tension it is a wonder one can recover in time for the happy ending.

That doesn’t count as a spoiler, does it?

Let's Go! World's Fairs of the 1930s

Did you know there was a World’s Fair in Cleveland in 1936? Neither did I, much less one with an eagle-eye concourse. So fixated is design history on the New York World’s Fair of 1939, with its Finnish Pavilion by Alvar Aalto and Futurama by Norman Bel Geddes, and the Chicago Century of Progress Exposition of 1933-34, with its glass House of Tomorrow by George Fred Keck that it has tended to forget the others: San Diego, Dallas, Cleveland and San Francisco. “Designing Tomorrow: America’s World’s Fairs of the 1930s,” an exhibition at the National Building Museum that closes July 10 rights that wrong, contextualizing the period by pointing out themes common across all the fairs, and putting on display photographs, posters, furniture, architectural models and ephemera.

New Apple HQ, 1957

On Tuesday, Steve Jobs unveiled Apple’s latest seamless, white, glowing product before the Cupertino City Council: the company’s proposed new headquarters, a four-story, glass-walled circular building intended to house 12,000 employees. “It’s a little like a spaceship landed,” Jobs said. And the blurry, sunstruck renderings (architect pointedly unspecified) did indeed remind me of early Spielberg.

But after marveling at the idea of an endless corridor of offices, and speculating on Twitter about which firm could handle all that curved glass, I realized Apple’s ring reminded me of something else. And it wasn’t the future. It was 1957.