Observatory

Gene & Jackie Lacy

By Amelia Lacy
Strains of Stan Kenton’s music fill a large, open studio in the Merchants Bank building in downtown Indianapolis. Simple white linen curtains are pushed away from the room’s tall windows; wide Venetian blinds have been pulled open to reveal the growing city below. Gauguin, Picasso and Mondrian prints cover the walls. Around the studio, perched at drawing boards, are eight designers, illustrators and typographers creating the designs that will soon become ads and logos for such corporations as Weimer Typesetting, American United Life Insurance Company (AUL) and Eli Lilly & Company.

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Observatory

Managing Digital Durability

By Rob Walker
Digital things can seem definitively less durable than physical ones, but that's misleading. In reality, digital stuff can linger on both by design, and by default. The question becomes: How to deal with that? This stuff is already here; maybe it can be made to be here in a better way.

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Places

The Uses of Daylight

By Keith Eggener
Earlier this year Keith Eggener assessed the career of the now forgotten early 20th-century Kansas City architect Louis Curtiss, and argued that Curtiss's obscurity has less to do with intrinsic merit than with the politics of professional reputation. Here — with an analysis of the Boley Building, which featured one of the first glass curtain walls in America — he makes good on his claim that Curtiss's legacy deserves new attention.

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Observatory

Our Mothers, Our Selves

By The Editors
Last year, we shared designers' baby pictures: this year, we're honoring mothers themselves — your mothers, with you.

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Observatory

The Mother of Us All

By Alexandra Lange
Reyner Banham wasn't cowed by many, but even he was nervous about meeting Esther McCoy. As Banham wrote, "Until about 1960, the rest of the world had practically no idea at all about architecture in California... Then this extraordinary book came out in 1960, and — suddenly — California architecture had heroes, history, and character." A new book of McCoy's writings has just been published, and you should get it.

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Places

The Last Days of Kaixian

Zhang Xiao & Aaron Rothman
On November 4, 2008, water rose over Kaixian, China — the final chapter in a history that dated back two millennia. Located on the Yangtze River, 180 miles upstream from the Three Gorges Dam — the largest water control project on earth — Kaixian was the final town submerged by the dam’s reservoir. Zhang Xiao, a photographer then working for a newspaper in nearby Chongqing, documented the town’s final dismantling. We are pleased to present a portfolio of his images.

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OBlog

Unusual Suspects: A New Series

The Editors
In 2007, Andrew Blauvelt wrote an essay about the history of graphic design in decentralized locales titled "Modernism in the Fly-Over Zone." In 2010, he expanded on this theme in a second essay titled, "Designer Finds History, Publishes Book." Blauvelt argued persuasively the we need to expand the canon of graphic design practitioners, looking over time at the contributions of local design leaders and legends — designers overlooked in our annuals and histories. We are embracing this challenge with a new series of essays and slideshows edited by Andrew Blauvelt and William Drenttel titled, Unusual Suspects.

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Observatory

Hamilton Wood Type and Printing Museum

By Bill Moran
When you arrive in the city of Two Rivers, Wisconsin you discover a smokestack of epic proportions. Measuring fourteen stories with 6-foot-tall brick letters that spell Hamilton — a 200-foot-tall sign for the Hamilton Wood Type foundry built in 1880 on the western shore of Lake Michigan. The center of the city is still dominated by warehouses and manufacturing plants that date back to the 1890s. Because the craft of making wood type and wood cabinetry generated so much sawdust, the company still uses it to heat its entire six block complex.

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Places

Art Village: A Year in Caochangdi

By An Xiao Mina
In January 2011 An Xiao Mina traveled from her native Los Angeles to the Beijing arts district of Caochangdi to work in the studio of artist Ai Weiwei. She arrived to find an uneasy place. Months earlier the residents — a mix of local and international artists and provincial migrants — had been notified by state authorities that Caochangdi was slated for demolition. Here Mina recounts a volatile but gratifying year spent "in a city that seemed to change with vertiginous speed."

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Observatory

Assignment Creativity

By Rob Walker
A recent book on "the art of the art assignment" offers a pleasing antidote to recent discourse on the subject of creativity. It's messy, open-ended, inspiring, chaotic, useful, and gave me a new appreciation for the assignment as a form.

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Change Observer

Flies in Urinals: The Value of Design Disruptions

By Andrew Shea
Many designers and educators are dubious of the recent surge of design altruism, noting that they rarely see evidence of social impact projects that lead to real behavior change. While it is well documented that public awareness campaigns generally work for actions that people perform infrequently, like donating to a disaster, it is much harder to change habitual actions in a meaningful way. Since daily habits are profoundly shaped by our environment, perhaps designers must disrupt the environment itself to change behaviors?

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Observatory

Accidental Mysteries, 05.06.12

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 nonsense diagrams.

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Observatory

Istanbul: City of Seeds

By John Thackara
Rather than dream up exotic visions of “what could be”, an xskool looks for social and natural assets that already exist – and grows from there. We bring together projects, however modest in scale, that meet daily life needs using the low-energy processes of natural systems, combined with the metabolic energy of social innovation. A kind of social seed exchange of the next economy.

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Observer Media

Steven Heller

By Debbie Millman
In this audio interview with Debbie Millman, Steven Heller discusses the big ideas that have changed graphic design – including the UPC code, teen magazines, white space and the pointed finger.

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Observatory

Against Kickstarter Urbanism

By Alexandra Lange
Kickstarter is not a popularity contest, or a democracy. Kickstarter’s founders select which projects go on the blog. Their declaration of a glorious new era for design suggests that projects that aren’t Kickstarter worthy aren’t worthy. A suitable funding platform for a watch is not a suitable funding platform for a city.

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Places

The Trash Heap of History

By Michael Ezban
The reuse of waste and remediation of landfills have inspired some of the most innovative contemporary landscape and urban design projects. Michael Ezban looks back two millennia and explores Monte Testaccio, the great garbage dump of imperial Rome. In this enduring landform — "a mountain of detritus in a city of storied hills" — he finds a dynamic precedent for landfill reclamation in our own eco-conscious era.

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Observatory

Public Space and the Skills of Citizenship: An Interview with Elihu Rubin

By Julia Novitch
"Public spaces can be charged politically because they enable citizens to gather, to represent themselves and to transmit messages. There is also a more benign sense of public space as a place where we can just idle. And yet there are tensions in terms of belonging to those places, the right to just be in those places. How long can someone who has nowhere else to go spend time in that space? The test of a public space is its tolerance."

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Observatory

Career Prospects in the Pain Business

By Rick Poynor
I was browsing the Guardian newspaper’s recruitment ads this week when I saw this ad for a job as a Torturer. It caught me off guard — as it was meant to — and I felt a few seconds of profound shock and dismay. The three ads in the UK charity Freedom from Torture’s new awareness and fundraising campaign deliver perfectly calculated moments of cognitive dissonance.

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Observatory

Another Imperiled Paul Rudolph Landmark

By Mark Lamster
With so much of our focus on the potential demise of Paul Rudolph's Orange Country Government Center, in Goshen, there hasn't been much conversation on the threat to another Rudolph landmark, his Sarasota High School of 1960. A renovation plan would utterly compromise this landmark building.

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Observatory

The Poster that Launched a Movement (Or Not)

By Michael Bierut
The Occupy Wall Street movement, which reaches a critical moment this week, began with that most conventional of graphic forms, a poster. The trouble is, hardly anyone has ever seen it. In the age of social media, does political graphic design matter?

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Observatory

Studio Culture: The Materialism of Matter

By Rick Poynor
I visited this design studio in Denver last year. Studio is something of an understatement. Matter, founded by former hardcore punk and now typophile Rick Griffith, is more like a studio/print shop/dance club with a store selling funky self-printed material out front. As a space, the Matter studio has a thickness of texture that comes from leaving the shell battered, rough and unfinished, like a lovingly arrested ruin-in-progress.

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Observatory

Accidental Mysteries, 04.29.12

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. This week's focus is tools of measurement and drafting.

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OBlog

Ideas that Matter

In 2009-10 we had the amazing experience of working with Berkshire Taconic Community Foundation on a Winterhouse initiative — housingus.org — supported by a Sappi "Ideas that Matter" grant. Housingus.org was a public awareness campaign to enhance the understanding of affordable housing as a critical element in the future of our towns and villages in the Berkshires (straddling Connecticut, New York and Massachusetts).

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Places

Visualizing the Ends of Oil

By Mark Feldman
For years visual artists have been documenting — critiquing — the environmental degradation of the planet. Mark Feldman looks closely at how the photographers Edward Burtynsky and Chris Jordan have struggled to visualize the consequences of oil, from extraction to use to waste. But what are the ultimate political or social effects? As Feldman asks: "To what degree can these photographs circulate as fine art images — making the usual circuit of galleries and museums — and at the same time be enlisted as evidence in environmental writing and politics?"

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