RECENT COMMENTS
The Butterfly People (1)Designed Landscapes (2)
Death’s Bloom (13)
Becoming a Designer in the Age of Aquarius (6)
Critical Beats (12)
OBSERVED
From his Abstract City blog, a collection of maps invented by the always amazing Christoph Niemann. [MB]Design Observer's Job Board has new jobs in Cambridge, NYC, Nashville, SF, Chicago, Cincinnati, DC, Atlanta and London. Companies hiring include Kaplan Test Prep, Clementine Paper, Bryant Park Corporation, Lowe's, Samsung, Alien Skin Software and Digitas. Post your job today. [JSC]
Greg Kindall's gallery of book trade labels. Exquisite. [JH]
Honest movie posters. (Via Kottke.) [MB]
When Herbert Matter got the job to design a new logo for the New Haven Railroad he literally went through hundreds of sketches before arriving at the final logo. [MB]
Finally! The South by Southwest festival announces the first ever competition to honor film and television titles. The inaugural list of nominees include Tom Barham at Curious Pictures, Brian Dixon, yU+Co, and Geoff McFetridge. [MB]
Design studio CHIPS (partly responsible for Too Hot For the Internet), teams up with Complex to compile their 50 Favorite Moments in Photoshop History. [JSC]
Look out, Art Director Ken! Joan Holloway, often called a living Barbie doll, is now available as an actual Barbie doll, along with fellow Mad Men Bruce Sterling and Don and Betty Draper. [MB]
SOM's Bruce Graham, the architect credited with creating modern Chicago, dies at 84. [MB]
"Hello, my name is Mister Glasses, and I'm an architect." The lonely struggle of the designer of the McKinny Factory Home and the Duluth Sanitarium. (Thanks to John Cantwell.) [MB]
Peak Water: Peter Gleick, founder of the San Francisco-based Pacific Institute, gave a recent talk at the World Affairs Council, "From Peak Oil to Peak Water," on the looming crisis of diminishing access to safe water and the critical role of conservation — a major challenge for urban policy and design. How bad will it get? Read Rebecca Solnit's review in the London Review of Books of James Powell's Dead Pool: Lake Powell, Global Warming, and the Future of Water in the West. [NL]
Chris Mottalini has been photographing the demolition of homes designed by Paul Rudolph. This collection (follow the link for "after you left, they took it apart") is a beautiful record of the lack of appreciation for midcentury modernism. (Thanks to Nate Huyler.) [JSC]
An I.Q. Test for aficionados of modernist furniture: Donald Judd, or Cheap Furniture? [LW]
Announcing the School of Visual Arts MFA Design Criticism Lecture Series, Spring 2010, featuring Design Trust for Public Space director Deborah Marton, GSA director of Design Excellence and the Arts Casey Jones, documentary filmmaker Gary Hustwit and author David Barringer, among others. Also, get ready for the first D-Crit Conference. [MB]
"Command Records was founded in 1959 by Enoch Light, a classical violinist, bandleader, and sound recording engineer. Enoch Light’s daughter, Julie Light, first made the connection to Albers — she studied with him at Black Mountain College." Josef Albers, album cover designer. (Via Quips.) [MB]
"Signage — the kind we see on city streets, in airports, on highways, in hospital corridors—is the most useful thing we pay no attention to." (Thanks to Kurt Koepfle.) [MB]
Design Observer's Job Board has new jobs in Boston, SF, Pittsburgh, Atlanta, NYC, Hong Kong, Chicago and Minneapolis. Companies hiring include Bureau Blank, Adam & Co., Hummel International, Nike, SCAD, Time Inc. and Carnegie Mellon. Post your job today. [JSC]
Congratulations to H5 and producer Nicolas Schmerkin, whose film Logorama won the Academy Award last night for best animated short subject. [MB]
A (remarkable) audio guide to split second Olympic finishing times. (Thanks to Jeffrey Kittay.) [MB]
"Girls and Women: Object Lessons in the Primacy of Interaction," a presentation by Allan Chochinov from the Interaction Design Conference in Savannah.
[MB]
Steve Heller reviews visual books about maps, including Mapping the World: Stories of Geography,, a beautiful history of cartography; The Map as Art: Contemporary Artists Explore Cartography, featuring pieces by Abigail Reynolds, Jeannie Thib and Greg Colson; Paris Underground: The Maps, Stations, and Design of the Métro, "a definitive history appropriate for die-hard subway and map devotees;" Strange Maps: An Atlas of Cartographic Curiosities, improbable, incomplete, incorrect — and funny — maps, from the blog of the same name; Unimark International: The Design of Business and the Business of Design, on the firm that designed, among other things, iconic signage and maps for the New York City Subway; and War Rugs: The Nightmare of Modernism, on the "eerily beautiful, decidedly disturbing" (and sometimes geographic) rugs produced by Afghan and Pakistani tribal workshops and refugee camps. Slideshow here. [MB]
The fifth annual call for entries for the Winterhouse Writing Awards is now open: deadline is June 1. $10,000 main prize given to a writer under 40 for an exemplary body of work and $1,000 student prize. This year's jurors are Paola Antonelli, Steven Heller and Rob Walker, with Jessica Helfand as Chair. (Read about last year's winners here.) [WD]
Design Observer's Job Board has new jobs in NYC, Seattle, Chicago, SF, Miami, London, DC, Santa Fe and Cambridge. Companies hiring include Madison Square Garden, Amazon, Kakai, Target, EnergyHub, H&R Block and Continuum. Post your job today. [JSC]
How John Dugdale, a blind photographer, shot the ad campaign for the Broadway revival of "The Miracle Worker." [MB]
Jane Dillon, the best product designer you've never heard of. [MB]
"I never knew a designer that got hundreds of thousands of dollars to design a logo. Mostly, designers get paid to negotiate the difficult terrain of individual egos, expectations, tastes, and aspirations of various individuals in an organization or corporation, against business needs, and constraints of the marketplace." Paula Scher on what they don’t teach you about identity design in design schools. [MB]
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Observatory
Becoming a Designer in the Age of Aquarius
By Steven Heller What’s the point of reviewing a design book that is over 40 years old, long out of print and tied to the style and technology of 1968? Well, S. Neil Fujita’s Aim for a Job in Graphic Design / Art (Richards Rosen Press, New York) is a fount of professional intelligence for an emerging field. It is also a slice of lost graphic design history worth reprising.
READ MORE | COMMENTS (6)
Places
Critical Beats
By Nancy LevinsonAlexandra Lange began her recent Observatory essay, "Why Nicolai Ouroussoff is Not Good Enough," with a provocative allusion to the possibility that the job of architecture critic "might be doomed," and that the current critic for the New York Times might be "the last architecture critic." Lange then concentrates on Ouroussoff's sensibility and approach, arguing eloquently that he is "making a poor case for keeping the breed." She doesn't really delve into whether the field has a future. So here we'd like to take up this thorny topic, and to suggest that architecture criticism, at least as practiced by our paper of record, is doomed, that in fact it's been losing force for years — and for reasons that have to do not just with the quality of the critical players but also with the rules of the critical game.
READ MORE | COMMENTS (12)
Observatory
Death’s Bloom
By Adam Harrison Levy From 1913 to 1971 five thousand one hundred and twenty one mentally ill patients were cremated on the grounds of the Oregon State Hospital. Their remains were sealed in copper canisters. In 2000 they were removed from their institutional crypt, placed on plain pine shelves in a storeroom, and were left virtually forgotten until David Masiel heard of their existence and photographed them.
READ MORE | COMMENTS (13)
By Eric BakerPlaces
The Architect as Urbanist: Part 1
By Robert BruegmannEarlier this week we featured Ian Baldwin's review of Paul Rudolph: Writings on Architecture. Now, continuing the focus on Rudolph, we present, in two parts, an essay by architectural historian Robert Bruegmann, originally published several years ago in a monograph on the architect's late work, by Roberto da Alba. "The Architect as Urbanist" reviews the architect's unusually volatile career, and offers a close and deeply observed reading of several of Rudolph's projects in southeast Asia. All were designed in the last decades of his life, and all have been comparatively neglected in the literature on an architect whose career is now exciting renewed interest — even as the built works continue to be demolished and threatened.
READ MORE | COMMENTS (1)
Change Observer
The Nano Effect on Urban India
By Avinash RajagopalStanding on a low, gray platform in the Cooper-Hewitt’s Great Hall, the Tata Nano, India's tiny, approachable new car, looks rather pleased with itself. Maybe it shouldn't.
READ MORE | COMMENTS (3)
Places
Reading Rudolph
By Ian BaldwinFew architects have experienced greater career swings than Paul Rudolph, who reached a pinnacle of professional and academic success in the 1960s — when as dean of architecture at Yale he designed the school's famous-notorious Art & Architecture Building — only to slide into relative obscurity in the '70s and '80s. Recent years have seen renewed interest within the discipline — not to mention a meticulous renovation of his Yale building, now Rudolph Hall — though not yet in the larger public, which never learned to like the so-called Brutalist style. Here Ian Baldwin, reviewing Paul Rudolph: Writings on Architecture, explores the architect's volatile reputation and analyzes the "image problem" that has led to the demolition of important works. Baldwin focuses particular attention on two projects of the 1960s in Massachusetts: Boston's Government Service Center and the campus at UMass Dartmouth. Later this week we will republish, in two parts, an essay by historian Robert Bruegmann that focuses on the architect's later and lesser known projects in Asia, and makes a case for the "architect as urbanist."
READ MORE | COMMENTS (6)
Observatory
Why Nicolai Ouroussoff Is Not Good Enough
By Alexandra Lange When I told an editor recently that my dream upon graduating from college was to be an architecture critic, she laughed. Not at me (I don’t think), but at the idea of aspiring to a job that might be doomed.
READ MORE | COMMENTS (70)
By Eric BakerOther Recent Posts
PLACES: Designed Landscapes
PLACES: Thomas Schumacher Symposium
CHANGE OBSERVER: Kopernik
CHANGE OBSERVER: The Butterfly People
PLACES: The Architect as Urbanist: Part 2
PLACES: This Place is a Message
PLACES: Introducing MIT's New Media Lab Complex
OBSERVATORY: What Am I Doing Here? Tall Buildings and High Anxiety in Las Vegas
PLACES: Imagining – A Better Future
CHANGE OBSERVER: The Volunteer Design Chronicles (Lincoln, NE)
RECENT HIGHLIGHTS
Alexandra Lange
Why Nicolai Ouroussoff Is Not Good Enough
Nancy Levinson
Critical Beats
Justin Kemerling
The Volunteer Design Chronicles
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Audio: Design Matters Archive
Andrew ZolliAndrew Zolli, founder of Z + Partners, a foresight think-tank, discusses the future of mass culture.
Listen >>
More Design Matters Archive >>
Observatory Archive
Books + Store: Books Received
In Pursuit of EleganceMatthew E. May
Innovation X
Adam Richardson
Integral Lars Müller
Lars Müller
I LEGO N.Y.
Christoph Niemann
The Oxford Companion to the Book
Michael F. Suarez & H. R. Woudhuysen
The Good Men Project
T. Matlack, J. Houghton & L. Bean
What Would Google Do?
Jeff Jarvis
Clever: Leading Your Smartest, Most Creative People
Rob Goffee & Gareth Jones
Innovation Tournaments
Christian Terwiesch & Karl Ulrich
How The Mighty Fall: And Why Some Companies Never Give In
Jim Collins
More Books Received >>
Recommended Books
ReFusing Fashion: Rei Kawakubo
Dresner, Hilberry & Miro, editors
The catalog that accompanied an exhibition of Rei Kawakubo's design for Comme des Garçons, with essays focused on her work as design process rather than (or alongside) fashion, by Harold Koda, Sylvia Lavin, Michael Stone-Richards and Judith Thurman. Designed by Danielle Aubert and Lana Cavar. Selected for AIGA's "50 Books." [LW]
Buy This Book >>
More Recommended Books >>
Dresner, Hilberry & Miro, editors
The catalog that accompanied an exhibition of Rei Kawakubo's design for Comme des Garçons, with essays focused on her work as design process rather than (or alongside) fashion, by Harold Koda, Sylvia Lavin, Michael Stone-Richards and Judith Thurman. Designed by Danielle Aubert and Lana Cavar. Selected for AIGA's "50 Books." [LW]
Buy This Book >>
More Recommended Books >>
Speak, Memory
Vladimir Nabokov
Who has written more evocatively and more precisely about memory, childhood and objects than Nabokov? His descriptions of his colored pencils or the lure of imported English products in pre-Revolutionary Russia or his nanny’s hands are examples of how physical objects and visual memory can be imbued with astonishing emotional meaning. [AHL]
Buy This Book >>
More Recommended Books >>
Vladimir Nabokov
Who has written more evocatively and more precisely about memory, childhood and objects than Nabokov? His descriptions of his colored pencils or the lure of imported English products in pre-Revolutionary Russia or his nanny’s hands are examples of how physical objects and visual memory can be imbued with astonishing emotional meaning. [AHL]
Buy This Book >>
More Recommended Books >>
A Women's Berlin: Building the Modern City
Despina Stratigakos
At the turn of the 20th century, as Berlin emerged as a modern metropolis, the city became the setting for a thriving network of women architects, artists, journalists, activists, and reformers. An elegantly written study of a neglected chapter in the city’s history that ended, like much else, with the rise to power of the Nazis. [NL]
Buy This Book >>
More Recommended Books >>
Despina Stratigakos
At the turn of the 20th century, as Berlin emerged as a modern metropolis, the city became the setting for a thriving network of women architects, artists, journalists, activists, and reformers. An elegantly written study of a neglected chapter in the city’s history that ended, like much else, with the rise to power of the Nazis. [NL]
Buy This Book >>
More Recommended Books >>
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