Thoughts on one of Dieter Rams’s 10 Principles of Good Design.

I believe this. Don’t you? You must, or you wouldn’t be reading this journal which, with its gray-on-gray scheme and boxy layout, resembles the aesthetic ideal to which Dieter Rams’ designs cleave. A functionalist might quibble with the lack of contrast. A minimalist might quibble with the bars. A modernist might wonder if the 1970s-style logotype wasn’t a little too much. But aesthetically it works: It sets a mood, and a different mood from other design blogs, despite the generalized preference for black, white and gray. Functionally it works too: The posts and parts are clearly identified and separated. The headlines are differentiated with just the sort of off-bright color Rams favored for his Braun calculators (look at the = button).

But there are thousands of other blogs that work equally well, maybe even better in terms of legibility, links, stickiness, that look terrible, junked up, in the manner of the rival stereos, shavers, shelves with logos and lights, extraneous moving parts and homey touches. Rams’s principles follow closely on the ideal of Good Design articulated by the Museum of Modern Art in its exhibitions of the 1950s: paring away, smoothing out, reducing visual clutter to try to leave just the parts absolutely necessary to perform the task. The MoMA idea conflated aesthetics and functionalism, but left out people who didn’t happen to share the same aesthetic. Some people want their stereo to match their shelves, and not be white, either. Sometimes the paring away goes too far. I’ve written before about my Jasper Morrison coffee pot, which suffers the same staining as the cheap ones, and doesn’t have a timer. It looks great, but fails on functional criteria.

On the flip side, there is the Congress for New Urbanism, which conflates aesthetics and functionalism from the opposite side. The work of the architects involved suggests that reasonable, even modern ideals for walkable towns, minimized car presence, shared community spaces, open facades have to look like Victorian villages. How does a gingerbread-trimmed porch function better than one with a concrete floor and steel pillars? It doesn’t, as long as its architect understands materials and proportion. Proponents act as if there is only one way (or a pattern book of traditional ways) for a new town to look, but we can look past their aesthetic to common principles.

The conflation of aesthetics and functionalism on what might be considered design’s right and left has led to a newly dominant (at least in the media) third way: social design. It is now a little shameful to admit you care deeply about how something looks. Instead, we care about its post-consumer content, its low price and third-world distribution channels, its health benefits, and so on. Worthy goals for most, but not all, design endeavors. I have yet to be convinced that shipping containers really do make great houses, however many we need to reuse, and however close to the early modern existenz minimum they appear. I would put the goals for social design under the heading of functionalism—in the 1950s corporations hoped modernism would increase productivity and satisfaction the way today’s corporations believe in sustainable architecture—and hope that going forward aesthetics might be acknowledged as part of the ideal. There can be good design (lower case) without aesthetics, but if you believe in this principle, as I do, it can’t be great.

There is still snow on the ground, and a cold wind blows off the dark blue waters of New York’s Seneca Lake, but inside the lake house of Kim and Wendell Weeks, it is warm and sunny. You can see the lake from almost any seat at the long maple dining table: choppy waves to the south, framed by a stand of trees and a chunky concrete inglenook; and, to the north, the house’s dock and a boxlike, wood-sided boathouse in the distance. The Combs Point House is long and lean, meandering back from the water into a glen. A boardwalk connects the house to two more structures in the glen, a one-room office and a two-bedroom guesthouse. All three are sided in cedar, but the house sloughs off solidity as it moves toward the lake: by the end, it is essentially a porch, half indoors, half outdoors, as the roof, its full length supported by twinned glue-laminated beams, rises up to gain a few more hours of sun.

Designer Todd Oldham has made recent plays for both the DIY market (with Handmade Modern) and the boutique baby market (with Charley Harper ABCs and 123s). For this holiday season, he tries to appeal to both at once with Kid Made Modern, 52 projects “inspired by mid-century modern design” for children 5 and up. As a mom who considers herself crafty and admires midcentury modern, I simply had to get my hands on it. There is a long history of designers applying their critical eye to the world of children — Charles and Ray Eames made films that are genuinely appealing to children, most notably Toccata for Toy Trains — but so many other “modern” toys seem much more appealing to parents than to kids. My son never uses the minimalist black Brio shape sorter I bought, preferring the plastic Fisher Price versions at other people’s houses. Was this book just for the junior coffee table, or could it offer elementary-schoolers a sense of the midcentury world? I decided to take it for a test-drive.

My husband has been saying for years that brass would come back. Not out of any particular love for the alloy, but because he saw that hardware trends were cyclical, chrome rising and falling in popularity, to be replaced by brushed stainless steel, then a brief flirtation with nickel, and so on. There really aren’t that many metal options, so surely brass’s time would come again. Initially this seemed impossible, since when most of us think of brass, we think of Trump Tower, ersatz gold, weightless flash, bad taste.

When Aline met Eero in January 1953, she was the associate art editor and critic for the New York Times, recently divorced, and on a trip to Detroit to meet the young architect whose General Motors Technical Center had proved to be such a smashing success. She was to write a profile of Saarinen for the New York Times Magazine, eventually published on April 23 as “Now Saarinen the Son” with the byline Aline B. Louchheim. A little over a year later she would become Aline B. Saarinen.

I never thought I would say this about a work by Thom Mayne of Morphosis, but I think 41 Cooper Square is too small. Cooper Union’s new, sustainable academic building on Third Avenue is nine stories, 175,000 square feet, takes up an entire city block, and yet, with all the other wonderful and terrible architecture happening on the Bowery and its side streets (the Cooper Square Hotel’s tower version of Frank Gehry’s IAC Building, Herzog and de Meuron’s disco-visionary 40 Bond, Foster + Partners’ Sperone Westwater Gallery) it blends right in. All the photographs I had seen, most taken from the air, made it look like another Mayne Death Star, a chunk of some intergalactic space ship deposited here for repairs (there is that nasty cut across the front).

“The park should, as far as possible, complement the town. Openness is the one thing you cannot get in buildings. Picturesqueness you can get. Let your buildings be as picturesque as your artists can make them. This is the beauty of a town. Consequently, the beauty of a park should be the other.”
Frederick Law Olmsted, “Public Parks and the Enlargement of Towns” (1870)

In Frederick Law Olmsted’s writings about parks, one can hear the sweat of his brow. We’ve become so accustomed to the Olmsted style of park: open greenswards, thickets of trees with curving walks, rambles of greater “wildness,” that they just seem natural. But they are as constructed, and as theorized, as any building. It was his genius to make them seem easy, and thus to allow the masses to move at their ease through his additions to the urban landscape. His parks (the most famous designed with British architect Calvert Vaux) had an agenda, one which derived directly from the idea of the park as a complement to, but ever different from, the town.

The High Line in Manhattan, whose first section opened Monday, would seem to be Olmsted’s nightmare. Built atop an abandoned railroad trestle, it is long and narrow. There is no room for a lawn, the soil is too shallow for big trees, and the city presses in, sometimes closely, sometimes from afar, at every point. There is nowhere to forget where you are, who you are, where you have come from, in the way Olmsted hoped Central Park would (a thought borrowed from A. J. Downing), wiping away class distinctions with fresh air and free admission. The High Line goes against all Olmsted’s principles, and yet reveals what we take for granted in larger more pastoral parks.

From the earliest days of the High Line, the new park being built from a 1.5 mile abandoned elevated rail line on Manhattan’s west side, its future was literally entwined with that of hotelier Andre Balazs’s first ground-up property, the Standard New York. The High Line passes through two other former industrial buildings, but the Standard is and likely will be the only structure built fresh over the former railbed, a portal over the park’s entrance seen in segments as you walk up Diller Scofidio + Renfro’s southernmost “slow staircase.” Other buildings touch the tracks, but the 20-story hotel straddles them. So it was with some relief that, as the hotel took shape, one could see that its concrete legs looked both shapely and tough, its underside crisply detailed and without fuss. The twinkling begins above, where the frame is filled with glass and bent at the center, so that the smaller operable windows sparkle within the grid.

Once upon a time in the 1970s, the festival marketplace was a treat. Its co-inventor, architect Benjamin Thompson, wrote: “The natural pageantry of crowds and goods, of meat, fish and crops from the fields, of things made and things grown, all to be tasted, smelled, seen and touched, are the prime source of sensations, experience and amusement in the daily lives of whole populations — were and still are, in most nations except our own.” Faneuil Hall, which opened in Boston in 1976, was his riposte to dying urban downtowns and everywhere-the-same malls. It was supposed to be more than commerce. It was an everyday fair.

When you are a design critic and a new parent, your first encounter with much of baby world leads to many questions. Why does every toy come in three primary colors, rather than a single hue? Why so bulbous? Why does it need to light up/sing “Old McDonald”/moo? My first encounter with the expanded Brooklyn Children’s Museum, which reopened in Crown Heights this September, made me ask almost the same questions—and with the same fear of being a spoilsport.