Observers Room

Santorum's Tragic Sweater Vest

By Rob Walker

In recent weeks, particularly after Rick Santorum's odds-defying surge in Iowa, his sweater vests have become the most widely scrutinized candidate-style object since Sarah Palin's glasses. The candidate now sells one emblazoned with his campaign logo. What is the real message of this particular garment?

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Places

If There Be Such Space

Michael Lundgren, Aaron Rothman & Josh Wallaert
Photographers Michael Lundgren and Aaron Rothman share an interest in the perception and representation of natural landscapes, and they have ventured together and separately to some of the same places in the American Southwest. Yet their voices are clearly distinct. This slideshow, drawn from a collaborative exhibition at the University of Virginia, explores the convergence and divergence of two artists working independently to measure the space between the self and world.

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Observer Media

Malcolm Gladwell

By Debbie Millman
A live episode of Design Matters with Debbie Millman discussing the launch of Malcolm Gladwell's illustrated collection of The Tipping Point, Blink and Outliers. Guests included artist and illustrator Brian Rea, designer Paul Sahre, Josh Liberson and DeeDee Gordon.

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Observatory

New Season of Design Matters with Debbie Millman

By The Editors
We are pleased to announce that the newest season of Design Matters with Debbie Millman will premiere on Observer Media today at 3pm with a video of Design Matters Live filmed by Hillman Curtis. Debbie Millman discusses the launch of Malcolm Gladwell's illustrated collection of The Tipping Point, Blink and Outliers. Guests included artist and illustrator Brian Rea, and designers Paul Sahre, Josh Liberson and DeeDee Gordon.

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Observers Room

Married at Moss

By Alexandra Lange
The closing of Soho design emporium Moss marks the end of an era, one doomed, I suspect, by the flood of internet images and the ease of price comparisons. The only time I was able to enter the world of Moss was when I was spending other people's money, a.k.a. when I got married, and registered there. After that experience, I encountered many, many other designers who chose the same rite of passage, selecting their grown-up things from Murray's museum-like shelves.

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Observers Room

Virtual Boring Agent

By John Thackara
I've seen this Virtual Boarding Agent a couple of times now at Orly Airport in Paris. It's a life-sized, life-like, two dimensional human figure that talks pleasantly about liquids and gels. It's spooky, clever and very well executed — and most people seem to ignore it after a first casual glance.

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Observers Room

Project Project Japan

By Mark Lamster
Floating cities. Capsule towers. Buildings that mutate. A reimagination of the physical landscape. Such were the promises of the Metabolists, the Japanese avant-gardists who emerged as a phenomenon in 1960 and reached their apogee a decade later as cultural heroes. They are back again today, and in all their modular glory.

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Places

Thirsty City

By Austin Troy
The urbanization of the American West is the result of diverse factors, including global industries, transport infrastructure and sunny weather. But in this arid region one factor above all has empowered the growth of Los Angeles and Las Vegas, Phoenix and Tucson — the importation of water. Environmental scientist Austin Troy assesses the massive infrastructure needed to move water long distances — and the massive quantities of energy that make it possible to take a shower in Southern California.

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Observers Room

Navy Yard, GradComD, Brown Bag, Hard Hat

By John Thackara
My talks and encounters in the US next week are about design for life after the industrial growth economy. I hope to see some of you there.

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Observatory

A History Of The World In 100 Objects

By Adam Harrison Levy
I've been told that our civilization will be known for our diaper landfills and our nuclear waste sites. Other fragments of our culture might survive as well: bits of Tupperware, mountains of lithium batteries or maybe the traces of our highway system. The foundation of a skyscraper might make for a breakthrough excavation but the islands of plastic bottles floating in the oceans may prove puzzling. Perhaps we will bury a cache of digital archives somewhere, to be deciphered one day like the hieroglyphics on an Egyptian sarcophagus.

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Observatory

Accidental Mysteries, 01.22.12

By John Foster
Accidental Mysteries, a weekly cabinet of visual curiosities curated by John Foster, highlights images of design, art, architecture and ephemera brought to light by the magic of the digital age.

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Places

Design, Research, Impact: URBANlab at CCA

Ila Berman & Mona El Khafif
As part of our occasional series on university design centers, we are pleased to profile URBANlab at the California College of the Arts. Led by CCA faculty members Ila Berman and Mona El Khafif, URBANlab works to build frameworks for collaboration on the social and environmental challenges confronting cities in the Bay Area and beyond. The goal, says Berman, is "project-based design research that furthers academic knowledge and has a direct effect on the realities it investigates."

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Observers Room

Ernst Haas and the Color Underground

By Rick Poynor
As a visual journalist working for national news magazines, Ernst Haas needed to show intelligible scenes, to tell stories. In his more personal color pictures, he moves in much closer to his subjects in search of a new visual world. Untethered from its setting, form starts to become abstract, focus blurs and colors flare. A recent book, Color Correction, seeks to restore Haas to “the vanguard of twentieth century photography.” 

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Observers Room

A Memorial to (Random Access) Memory

By Alexandra Lange
IBM Building 25's foremost contribution to computing history was the invention of the "flying head" disc drive, that allowed for online processing. This hard disc memory was deployed in the IBM 305 RAMAC computer, a room-size installation that looked not unlike the boxy buildings in which it was researched, developed and manufactured. Given the importance of memory in the history of Silicon Valley, it seems ironic that so many elements of Building 25's story have been forgotten.

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Places

Lessons from the Front Lines of Social Design

By Will Holman
Will Holman has studied and worked at Arcosanti, Rural Studio and YouthBuild. He describes the experiences as hard to quantify. "I’ve dug septic lines, chain-sawed tornado debris, shoveled gravel... I’ve code-checked drawings, drafted into the night, surveyed sites. But the real results are intangible — relationships, experiences, memories, lessons learned." Yet Holman thinks the profession has paid little attention to how architects might "put together a career in social design."

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Observers Room

Rethinking Roosevelt Island

By Mark Lamster
Earlier this week I took a ride out to Roosevelt Island, inspired to look into the site that will soon be developed into a tech campus by Cornell University and the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology. You have no doubt heard about this project, which will be a cornerstone of our very tech-savvy mayor's legacy. But what does it mean for Roosevelt Island?

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Places

Detroit Re-Photography

Dave Jordano & Aaron Rothman
In the early 1970s photographer Dave Jordano documented a series of buildings and places in his native Detroit; in 2010 he returned to the same spots. The result is the Detroit Rephotography Survey, selections of which we are pleased to present here. As our photo editor Aaron Rothman notes, Jordano's then-and-now images "implicate us in the changes they depict," and work as a kind of antidote to the cool aestheticism of ruin porn.

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Observatory

Imaging the Brain

By Michael Erard
Like the map of the American West, the parts of the human brain are named for its explorers, who had a penchant for honoring each other with slices of cerebral territory. Broca. Wernicke. Heschl. Brodmann. Rather unhelpfully to someone who doesn't live and breathe brain anatomy.

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Observatory

Remembering Eva Zeisel

By John Foster
Eva Zeisel, a pioneer of 20th-century industrial design, celebrated her 105th birthday with family and friends last November 13, 2011. After a long and extraordinary life, she passed away less than two months later on December 30. Like so many others who appreciated her influence in modernist design, I was sad to hear of her passing. Her life, at times, read like a Hollywood script.

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Observers Room

Package It Black

By Rob Walker
A product called Marlboro Black might call to mind everything negative and dangerous about cigarettes. But that strategy might not be as suicidal as it sounds. Maybe wrapping smokes in the graphics of a warning is a form of design jujitsu: the allure of the unsafe.

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Observatory

Reassessing the Saul Bass and Alfred Hitchcock Collaboration

By Pat Kirkham
Drawing upon a wide range of sources, including interviews with designer and filmmaker Saul Bass and film director Billy Wilder, this article reassesses the evidence, scholarship and debates about the contributions made by Bass to three films directed by Alfred Hitchcock.

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Observers Room

Read All That? You Must be Kidding Me

By Rick Poynor
The issues surrounding reading and writing that Ellen Lupton raises in an essay for Graphic Design: Now in Production have been with us for decades. From Amusing Ourselves to Death to The Gutenberg Elegies to The Shallows cultural critics have clanged the alarm about the fate of reading in an electronic age. While these issues do possess a design dimension, addressing them largely from a designer’s perspective misses some central points.

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Places

The Forgetting Machine: Notes Toward a History of Detroit

By Jerry Herron
"What does it add up to, all this abandonment of lives and buildings, neighborhoods and property? It doesn’t seem to add up to anything... This city is never coming back; whatever happens next will be without precedent because the context of city no longer applies in this place where history has finally run out." Here Jerry Herron reflects on Detroit, tracking the excesses of ruin porn, the decline of Hudson's, and the hopefulness of a retrofitted carpark in a gutted theater.

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Observers Room

A Reading List for Mr. Monti

By John Thackara
When the new Italian Prime Minister, Mr. Mario Monti, gave his acceptance speech to the Italian Senate before Christmas, he used the word "growth" 28 times and the word "energy" — well, zero times. Why would this supposed technocrat neglect even to mention the biophysical basis of the world's economy? Well, Mr. Monti is better described as a theocrat, than a technocrat. His main job is to keep us all believing in the impossible: an economy that expands to infinity in a finite world. It's important that we stay mesmerised: once we stop believing in his make-believe world it will all come crashing down.

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Observatory

Accidental Mysteries, 01.08.12

By John Foster
Accidental Mysteries, a weekly cabinet of visual curiosities curated by John Foster, highlights images of design, art, architecture and ephemera brought to light by the magic of the digital age.

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