Observers Room

On My Shelf: A Classic by Berger and Mohr

By Rick Poynor
For a book that can justly be called a masterpiece, John Berger and Jean Mohr’s A Fortunate Man, published in 1967, is not nearly as well known as it should be. A brilliantly imaginative and empathic fusion of words and photographs, it is a study of a doctor’s life in a small rural community that addresses fundamental questions about the doctor-patient relationship and what it means to assume and bear such responsibilities as a healer.

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Observatory

Accidental Mysteries, 02.12.12

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. This week's focus is Politics.

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Observers Room

An (Overdue) Memorial for New York

By Mark Lamster
One cannot compare tradgedies, but it's hard not to notice that here in New York we've spent billions of dollars and the last decade coming to terms with the nightmare of 9/11, while there has been, until now, no drive for a memorial to the more than 100,000 victims of the AIDS epidemic.

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Observer Media

Cheryl Heller

By Debbie Millman
In this audio interview with Debbie Millman, Cheryl Heller discusses collaboration, innovation, her new MFA program at SVA and why the word "brand" is like leather pants.

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Places

An Interview with Jacques Herzog

Marc Angélil, Jørg Himmelreich, Hubertus Adam & J. Christoph Bürkle
In 1978 Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron founded their office in Basel. Since then the partnership, which now employs more than 350, has designed a series of landmark projects, from the Tate Modern in London to the National Stadium — the bird's nest — for the Beijing Olympics. Recently Jacques Herzog talked with historians Hubertus Adam and J. Christoph Bürkle about the challenges of maintaining a creatively vital practice and confronting the new challenges of urbanization.

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Observatory

Pop Photographica: An Interview with Daile Kaplan

By Michelle Hauser
Daile Kaplan’s comprehensive collection has one unifying trait: a photographic element that was not intended for viewing on the wall. As her collection evolved, Kaplan discovered that what she was surrounding herself with was indeed an overlooked photographic genre. In the late 1980s, Kaplan named the genre “pop photographica.”

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Observers Room

Beautified Words

By Rob Walker
What we’re dealing with here is the question of form vs. content. Do the exact same words of love have different meaning, or impact if they’re scrawled, typed, laser-printed in a handsome font, or artfully hand-executed by a genuine artist of calligraphy?

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Observers Room

Want to Buy A Valentine?

By Alexandra Lange
You can buy a valentine handmade by someone else. You can send your beloved a vintage card using an app. But where's the romance in that? That part of the card you made where you messed up, and you couldn't start over, that has love in it too.

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Places

Louis Curtiss and the Politics of Architectural Reputation

By Keith Eggener
Louis Curtiss practiced architecture in Kansas City around the turn of the 20th century, producing, says Keith Eggener, a series of innovative buildings "comparable in their creative eclecticism" to those of contemporaries like Bernard Maybeck and Bertram Goodhue. Yet unlike those celebrated architects, Curtiss remains relatively obscure, his works neglected. And the reasons, Eggener argues, have less to do with artistic merit than with various extrinsic factors that have long controlled the politics of professional reputation.

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Observatory

Designers Leap, Users Lag

By Owen Edwards
In my occasional role as a writer about motorcycles, I am currently testing a new Honda CBR250R. I’ve been delighted to find that this little moto is so beautifully engineered and designed (the two disciplines tend to merge in motorcycles) that it’s a terrific ride, only slightly slower from point to point on twisty country roads than much bigger machines.

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Observatory

Accidental Mysteries, 02.05.12

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. This week John focuses on "The White Project", a collection of photos by Jane and Francois Robert.

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Places

Building After Auschwitz

By Mitchell Schwarzer
Is it possible to identify a type of Jewish architecture? An architecture that has to do not necessarily with Jewish programs, like synagogues or Holocaust memorials, but instead with Jewish architects and how their various works have been shaped by the historical memory of exile? Mitchell Schwarzer reviews the new book Building After Auschwitz, which grapples with this thorny question.

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Observer Media

Erik Spiekermann

By Debbie Millman
In this audio interview with Debbie Millman, Erik Spiekermann discusses why numbers are harder to design than letters, finding his print shop burned to the ground and why he's trying to get out of work.

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Observers Room

The Evil Genius of David Shrigley

By Rick Poynor
Paunchy Gods, blank-eyed nutcases, violent nurses — David Shrigley’s scribbly line and view of the world are dark, dysfunctional, and perfect for our times. Anyone who has seen his books or drawings won’t be surprised to learn that God and the Devil played a larger-than-average role in his early years. The subject of a major exhibition that opens this week in London, he is forever tempting and testing the viewer.

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Observers Room

Roasted by a Chicken

By John Thackara
I did not realise, I swear, that my talk in New York this week, which is about design in a gift economy, will coincide with the city's huge 35,000 visitor International Gift Fair. Someone out there in gift-land is on is on the marketing ball, because they sent me an email the day after my talk was announced.

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Places

Hospitality Begins at Home

By Deborah Gans
In our era of heightened terrorist threat and political and economic struggle, the passage across national borders has become ever more fraught. Deborah Gans visits a digital exhibit by artist Maya Zack, on the theme of Jewish life in prewar Berlin, and travels to the In-House Festival in Jerusalem, which evoked the salon culture created there by European emigres. The experiences inspire her to probe the spatial and political dimensions of journeying from one's homeland, a space of family and citizenship, to a foreign land, where one is a stranger, perhaps a refugee.

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Observers Room

The Ezra Winter Project: Chapter One

By Jessica Helfand
He rose as if from nowhere, a farm boy from rural Michigan — self-taught, fiercely driven, tall and handsome and unequivocally ambitious. He married, started a family and won the Prix de Rome just before World War I. Part angry young man and part hopeless romantic, his is a fascinating story of remarkable accomplishment and ineffable tragedy. This is the first installment in a year-long visual biography of Ezra Winter — the most famous artist you’ve never heard of.

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Observers Room

In Response to An Anatomy of Uncriticism

By Rick Poynor
Alexandra Lange has an interesting piece in the latest issue of Print about the sacred cows of graphic design. I was agog to hear what she would say about the field’s self-congratulatory ways and deep-seated reluctance to criticize sainted figures and celebrated institutions. Weirdly, though, she almost entirely sidesteps the issue. Most of the examples in her essay are peripheral to graphic design.

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Observatory

Accidental Mysteries, 01.29.12

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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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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