Observers Room

Beauty from Junk: The Floating Genius of Harvest Dome

By Mark Lamster
Even when we were kids growing up in New York City, Alex Levi had a rather quirky sense of the city and its aquatic spaces. One summer we took a film class at NYU, and Alex made a comic short about a monster who lived at the bottom of Boat Pond, in Central Park. All these years later, Alex is still bringing his unique creative vision to New York's waterways.

READ MORE  |  COMMENTS

Observers Room

The Unspeakable Pleasure of Ruins

By Rick Poynor
It’s extraordinary, to someone who doesn’t live in Detroit or elsewhere in America, how contentious the widely publicized pictures of urban devastation in the city have become. They are the prime, disreputable exhibits of so-called “ruin porn,” a term frequently used now in the US. Ruin porn is a corrosively repeatable meme that makes any photograph of ruins seem suspect. This reductive tag ignores the cultural history of the ruin.

READ MORE  |  COMMENTS (4)

Places

Housing Chicago: Cabrini-Green to Parkside of Old Town

By Lawrence Vale
For more than a decade the Chicago Housing Authority has been tearing down the city's high-rise public housing projects and replacing the subsidized residences with mixed-income communities of townhomes and mid-rise apartments. Urban historian Lawrence Vale recounts the troubled saga of the now-demolished Cabrini-Green, and the municipal policies and politics that work to exclude the neediest citizens— including some displaced from the old towers — from the brand-new redevelopment.

READ MORE  |  COMMENTS (2)

Observers Room

A Place Called "Space Available"

By Rob Walker
While researching his current Historian's Eye project, Matthew Frye Jacobson struggled to find a public, photographable dimension of the economic crisis. Then an interview subject pointed him in a surprising direction: "Space Available" signage. The hundreds of pictures that resulted form their own troubling geography.

READ MORE  |  COMMENTS (3)

Observatory

Accidental Mysteries, 02.19.12

By John Foster
This collection of underground music and culture events flyers come from the personal online collection of Chicago collector Marc Fischer. Most of them are from metal and hardcore shows, in particular. Many are from Philadelphia and Pittsburgh from the mid-late 1980s and early 1990s. Others were collected from other cities during the same time period or were mailed to me by friends around the country.

READ MORE  |  COMMENTS (3)

Observers Room

At Home at the Edge of the World

By Mark Lamster
About a week after the death of Steve Jobs, I sat down for an interview with Peter Bohlin, architect of Apple's spectacular glass-walled retail stores. The subject of our interview was a new house designed by Bohlin in the Connecticut woods, but of course I could not help but ask about Jobs.

READ MORE  |  COMMENTS

Observer Media

James Biber

By Debbie Millman
In this audio interview with Debbie Millman, James Biber discusses growing up in a house with a womb chair, visual illiteracy, the global impact of Waffle House design and designing the Museum of Sex.

READ MORE  |  COMMENTS (1)

Observers Room

Downton Abbey: Fell In Love With a House

By Alexandra Lange
As in Jane Austen, from whose Pride and Prejudice the Matthew-Lady Mary relationship initially seemed remixed, behind every love match is the question of property. Downton Abbey, for all its melodrama and dropped teacups, is really the story of falling in love with a house.

READ MORE  |  COMMENTS (2)

Observers Room

Design In The Light of Dark Energy

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" zero times. And Mr. Monti is not the only politician promoting growth over common sense and the laws of physics. They're all at it, including President Obama. These politicians principal job is to keep us in thrall to a myth: an economy that expands to infinity in a finite world.

READ MORE  |  COMMENTS (1)

Places

Housing and the 99 Percent

By Jonathan Massey
Occupy Wall Street and We Are the 99 Percent have spread rapidly, capturing and personifying the national unease about deepening economic inequality and the waning of the American dream. Architectural historian Jonathan Massey explores how housing — along with the various governmental and banking policies that structured home ownership across the decades — has worked to reflect and mediate, to promote and endanger that dream.

READ MORE  |  COMMENTS

Observers Room

Round Thermostats and Crystal Lanterns, Revisited

By Alexandra Lange
While the tech blogs have a knee-jerk affinity for Apple, I have a knee-jerk affinity for the industrial design greats of old. I couldn't believe that Walter Isaacson, in his biography of Steve Jobs, wrote as if Apple were the first computer company to have a design program. There's no reason to be so snotty about old tricks.

READ MORE  |  COMMENTS (6)

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.

READ MORE  |  COMMENTS (3)

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.

READ MORE  |  COMMENTS

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.

READ MORE  |  COMMENTS (4)

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.

READ MORE  |  COMMENTS (1)

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.

READ MORE  |  COMMENTS

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.”

READ MORE  |  COMMENTS (2)

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?

READ MORE  |  COMMENTS (3)

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.

READ MORE  |  COMMENTS (5)

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.

READ MORE  |  COMMENTS (2)

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.

READ MORE  |  COMMENTS (3)

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.

READ MORE  |  COMMENTS (7)

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.

READ MORE  |  COMMENTS (1)

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.

READ MORE  |  COMMENTS (2)

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.

READ MORE  |  COMMENTS (1)