Observatory

Accidental Mysteries, 05.27.12

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 medieval coins and artifacts.

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Places

Marginalia: Little Libraries in the Urban Margins

By Shannon Mattern
The public library is struggling. Yet even as budgets dwindle and services contract, the library remains popular and beloved — and lately its ongoing vitality is being underscored by the rise of the little library, what Shannon Mattern calls "the emergence of myriad mini, pop-up, guerrilla and ad-hoc libraries." Mattern sees the movement as an effort "to reclaim a small corner of public space in our hyper-commercialized cities, cities that might no longer reflect the civic aspirations of a diverse public."

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OBlog

Why Write About Graphic Design?

Let’s remember that graphic design is about ideas, and ideas mean words — beautiful, descriptive, analytical and magical words. We write about graphic design, quite frankly, because we can.

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Observatory

Graphic Design is Dead, Long Live Graphic Design

By David Cabianca
Unlike painting or sculpture — but like architecture — graphic design is still governed by certain limits. Graphic designers, like architects, still abide by professional codes of practice. But when it is approached as a discipline, graphic design has the potential to question the codes that constitute and enforce its limits. By exploring the ways that graphic design is formally determined, it becomes possible for design to discover, invent and assert itself as a unique way to envision and communicate.

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Observatory

Peter Seitz

By Kolean Pitner
Peter Seitz is a German born graphic designer who was responsible for bringing the ideas and ideals of European Modernism to the Upper Midwest in the 1960s. After studying design at Ulm Hochschule für Gestaltung (HfG) and Yale University, he was appointed Design Curator at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

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Observatory

The Geometry of Time

By Adam Harrison Levy
In 1977, a young American student on her junior year abroad in Rome discovered a secondhand bookshop called the Liberia Maldoror and became friends with the group of Italian artists who spent time there. They were all great admirers of surrealism. One day, she approached an owner of the bookstore (which was also an art gallery) and handed him a grey cloth box. “I’m a photographer,” she said. He opened the box. “I was both awestruck and filled with joy: standing before me was a great artist” he later recalled. The young student was the photographer Francesca Woodman.

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Observatory

Who Is the Arne Jacobsen of Urban Food?

By John Thackara
The largest food exporter in Sweden is Ikea (meatballs). For every meal eaten in a UK restaurant, nearly half a kilo of food is wasted. About 40 percent of the food produced in the United States isn’t consumed. Every day, Americans waste enough food to fill the Rose Bowl. US citizens waste 50 per cent more food today than they did in 1974. Doggy bags are taboo in Danish restaurants. Waste is just one of many wicked problems concerning food in cities.

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Observatory

The Well-Tempered Environment

By Alexandra Lange
What I was looking for in Dallas and Fort Worth was connective tissue, the landscape architecture that ties buildings together in a district and makes a downtown into a place you want to stroll. In Texas, that's not possible without water and old trees (or their high-tech shading equivalents). Food trucks help, too, to turn an opera house lawn into a midday destination.

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Observatory

Accidental Mysteries, 05.20.12

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 paper folding art.

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OBlog

Poetry Editor: Adam Plunkett

Announcing that Adam Plunkett, who has previously written for The New Republic, n+1 and Bookforum,  is joining Design Observer as our Poetry Editor.

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Observatory

When the Spirit Comes to Him as the Voice of Morning Light

By Michael McGriff
You held your head in the Millicoma River,
opened your eyes before the spawning kings,

beheld the chuff of their rotting heads,
and said, Is this the milk of Paradise? to no one.
 
And when no one and nothing
was exactly what you wanted

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Places

Plato's Home Movies

By Eric William Carroll
Deep among the eucalyptus groves of San Francisco's Golden Gate Park, joggers and dog walkers discovered Eric William Carroll setting up a projection screen to observe shadows on the wall of “Plato's Cave.” On the sidewalks of Brooklyn, he laid out blueprint paper to capture ephemeral portraits of sidewalk trees. Here we present a portfolio drawn from his investigations of frame, shadow, time and the “essential form” of the tree.

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Observatory

The Strange Afterlife of Common Objects

By Rick Poynor
The pictures shown here were taken last week in a shop called The Works: “Objects of Desire” in the Çukurcuma district of Istanbul. No matter how seasoned you may be as a browser of junk shops, quirky antique dealers and flea markets, The Works is one of the great rococo emporiums of bric-a-brac. In shops like these, Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk found the objects for his newly opened Museum of Innocence.

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Observatory

The War Against Sixties Architecture

By Mark Lamster
A few days ago news broke that, absent some last-minute stay, John Johansen's Mummers Theater in Oklahoma City will face demolition. This comes on the heels of a report, just a week earlier, that Johansen's Mechanic Theater in Baltimore is also slated for destruction. It would be a crime to lose them.

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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. 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 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, 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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