Design

MOYNIHAN HALL, CONT’D.

A little more about the question of style. Style is not about what you say but how you say it, not about content but delivery. The impersonal announcements of voicemail, or of a public address system, are almost pure content, there is very little delivery beyond a certain functional brevity. But an actual person speaking includes variable emphasis of tone and volume, facial expressions, hand gestures, asides, jokes, and so on. The effect can be conversational or stentorian, formal or informal, intimate or cold, depending on the style. That is why the word was originally used in the context of rhetoric.

… Read more

A GOOD CAUSE

Home: A Celebration, just published by Rizzoli, is a beautiful book in a good cause; it’s a fundraiser for No Kid Hungry. The interior decorator Charlotte Moss has brought together essays, poems, sketches, and photographs by a variety of authors, including Joyce Carol Oates, Isaac Mizrahi, Annie Leibovitz, Julian Fellowes, Bette Midler, John Grisham, and Alice Waters. There are a few architects, too: Marc Appleton, Michael Imber, Tom Kligerman. And yours truly.

… Read more

COMFORT

“And really, isn’t that what design is meant to do? Challenge us, provoke us, unsettle our expectations. Comfort is welcome. But discomfort can be, too,” concludes a recent editorial in the New York Times’ T Magazine. Oh, really? That’s what design is meant to do? A certain kind of architect and designer—or in this case, magazine editor—considers comfort to be the equivalent of complacency. Or is this just a rationalization, a way to justify exposing concrete, painting surfaces black, leaving out upholstery? No one should confuse comfort with good design; comfort is not sufficient,

… Read more

i-BAUHAUS

Nicholas Fox Webber, the author of a biography of Le Corbusier, has recently published iBauhaus. I have not read the book yet, but the subtitle, “The iPhone as the Embodiment of Bauhaus Ideals and Design,” says it all. There is no doubt that the iPhone is a minimalist, no frills machine and proud of it. It is also a quintessentially Bauhaus example of form follows predetermined aesthetics rather than form follows function. The iPhone doesn’t fit the human hand particularly well, certainly not as well as the classic Western Telephone Model 500 handset designed by Henry Dreyfuss in the 1940s.

… Read more

RULES

A friend of mine recently emailed me a telling criticism of New Urbanism. “I’ve noticed a strange need to quantify everything from these guys. It’s almost like they are trying to deduce a pattern . . .  and even worse . .  many would lean toward  legislating the pattern.” There it is in a nutshell. Of course, ever since Palladio wrote Quattro Libri, architects have been fascinated by the dimensions of things—of rooms, ceilings, doors, windows, and so on. Palladio had rules about all of them. But he was always careful to allow for exceptions. Writing about the height of ceiling vaults,

… Read more

IN MEMORIAM

On January 8, 1958, a fire broke out on the Norwegian ship Earling Jarl while the vessel was docked in Bodø, a small coastal town north of the Arctic Circle. The ship was part of the Hurtigrutten (Express Route), which serves small isolated communities up and down the coast carrying mail, goods, and people. The route is between Kirkenes in the north and Bergen, about five days sailing. The Earling Jarl fire took the lives of fourteen people. A small bronze memorial stands in the town to commemorate the event—and the victims. The artist is Istvan Lisztes,

… Read more

BLACK IS THE NEW BLACK

When I went to school in England in the fifties we were obliged to wear blue blazers with the school crest. I came across this photo of a class of the Interior Design Department of Northumbria University taken in the Bauhaus building in Dessau. Apparently strict dress codes still apply, and are followed by instructors as well as students, and are even extended to hijabs. Gropius would be pleased.

… Read more

WHY THE FRENCH LIKE MODERN DESIGN

Watching the French television political soap Marseille—but anything with Gérard Depardieu can’t be all bad—I was struck, again, by how much the French like modern design. The furniture in the scenes was inevitably modernist, more so than would be the case in Madame Secretary, say. Then it struck me that while the furniture was aggressively modern, most of the background architecture was not. The Marseille city hall, for example, is a beautiful seventeenth-century building; Depardieu’s home (he plays the mayor, of course) is a fin-de-siècle villa. In one episode, a hospital room filled with the latest medical gadgetry in a private clinic,

… Read more