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Today, 03.13.10 (3)Critical Beats (16)
The Butterfly People (1)
Designed Landscapes (2)
Death’s Bloom (14)
OBSERVED
The Yale University Library's Arts of the Book Collection includes a mostly uncatalogued collection of nearly one million bookplates. Slide shows here and here. (Thanks to Andrea Montfried.) [MB]Lovely, gifted design writer Sarah Verdone dies after a long struggle with cancer. Our heartfelt condolences to her husband, Tucker Viemeister, and daughters, Josephine and Louisa. [JL]
Arial: it's a little bit bullshit! [MB]
Attendees at this year's Design Indaba conference in Cape Town were treated to crowd-pleasing video mashups like this one: stunning. (Thanks to Malcolm Drenttel.) [JH]
On May 13th, 1946, Jon Gnagy became the first performer on the first show broadcast on the Empire State Building's newly-installed television antenna. Remembering "Learn to Draw with Jon Gnagy," the world's first television art teacher. [MB]
It's the Dreaded Killer Jellyfish of Graphic Design Favors: now available as a poster! [MB]
David Pearson, the man behind the legendary Penguin Great Ideas series, designs beautiful handmade covers for the books of Cormac McCarthy. (Via AceJet.) [MB]
From his Abstract City blog, a collection of maps invented by the always amazing Christoph Niemann. [MB]
Design Observer's Job Board has new jobs in Cambridge, NYC, Nashville, SF, Chicago, Cincinnati, DC, Atlanta and London. Companies hiring include Kaplan Test Prep, Clementine Paper, Bryant Park Corporation, Lowe's, Samsung, Alien Skin Software and Digitas. Post your job today. [JSC]
Greg Kindall's gallery of book trade labels. Exquisite. [JH]
Honest movie posters. (Via Kottke.) [MB]
When Herbert Matter got the job to design a new logo for the New Haven Railroad he literally went through hundreds of sketches before arriving at the final logo. [MB]
Finally! The South by Southwest festival announces the first ever competition to honor film and television titles. The inaugural list of nominees include Tom Barham at Curious Pictures, Brian Dixon, yU+Co, and Geoff McFetridge. [MB]
Design studio CHIPS (partly responsible for Too Hot For the Internet), teams up with Complex to compile their 50 Favorite Moments in Photoshop History. [JSC]
Look out, Art Director Ken! Joan Holloway, often called a living Barbie doll, is now available as an actual Barbie doll, along with fellow Mad Men Bruce Sterling and Don and Betty Draper. [MB]
SOM's Bruce Graham, the architect credited with creating modern Chicago, dies at 84. [MB]
"Hello, my name is Mister Glasses, and I'm an architect." The lonely struggle of the designer of the McKinny Factory Home and the Duluth Sanitarium. (Thanks to John Cantwell.) [MB]
Peak Water: Peter Gleick, founder of the San Francisco-based Pacific Institute, gave a recent talk at the World Affairs Council, "From Peak Oil to Peak Water," on the looming crisis of diminishing access to safe water and the critical role of conservation — a major challenge for urban policy and design. How bad will it get? Read Rebecca Solnit's review in the London Review of Books of James Powell's Dead Pool: Lake Powell, Global Warming, and the Future of Water in the West. [NL]
Chris Mottalini has been photographing the demolition of homes designed by Paul Rudolph. This collection (follow the link for "after you left, they took it apart") is a beautiful record of the lack of appreciation for midcentury modernism. (Thanks to Nate Huyler.) [JSC]
An I.Q. Test for aficionados of modernist furniture: Donald Judd, or Cheap Furniture? [LW]
Announcing the School of Visual Arts MFA Design Criticism Lecture Series, Spring 2010, featuring Design Trust for Public Space director Deborah Marton, GSA director of Design Excellence and the Arts Casey Jones, documentary filmmaker Gary Hustwit and author David Barringer, among others. Also, get ready for the first D-Crit Conference. [MB]
"Command Records was founded in 1959 by Enoch Light, a classical violinist, bandleader, and sound recording engineer. Enoch Light’s daughter, Julie Light, first made the connection to Albers — she studied with him at Black Mountain College." Josef Albers, album cover designer. (Via Quips.) [MB]
"Signage — the kind we see on city streets, in airports, on highways, in hospital corridors—is the most useful thing we pay no attention to." (Thanks to Kurt Koepfle.) [MB]
Design Observer's Job Board has new jobs in Boston, SF, Pittsburgh, Atlanta, NYC, Hong Kong, Chicago and Minneapolis. Companies hiring include Bureau Blank, Adam & Co., Hummel International, Nike, SCAD, Time Inc. and Carnegie Mellon. Post your job today. [JSC]
Congratulations to H5 and producer Nicolas Schmerkin, whose film Logorama won the Academy Award last night for best animated short subject. [MB]
A (remarkable) audio guide to split second Olympic finishing times. (Thanks to Jeffrey Kittay.) [MB]
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Observatory
The Lines That Divide
By Andy ChenCan't "art" and "design" approaches coexist simultaneously in our practice? Why are we so eager to create a cut-and-dry dichotomy between the two? These questions lie at the center of the debate as the selection process continues for a new Head of Department for the Communication Art & Design course at London's Royal College of Art.
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Places
Words and Pictures
By Robert TaylorArchitects Fumihiko Maki and Shigeru Ban have each recently published books. Maki's Nurturing Dreams is an essay collection by a stellar member of the postwar generation that played a central role only in rebuilding Japan but also in defining contemporary Japanese architecture. Ban's 1985–2007 is a mid-career monograph by an influential practitioner in the generation that followed. In his review, Boston-based architect Robert Taylor notes that the books represent different traditions of architectural bookmaking, and each, he says, merits our attention.
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By Eric BakerChange Observer
Kopernik
By Kaomi GoetzA new website follows the increasingly familiar model of funding socially progressive design and technology projects a few dollars at a time.
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Observatory
Becoming a Designer in the Age of Aquarius
By Steven Heller What’s the point of reviewing a design book that is over 40 years old, long out of print and tied to the style and technology of 1968? Well, S. Neil Fujita’s Aim for a Job in Graphic Design / Art (Richards Rosen Press, New York) is a fount of professional intelligence for an emerging field. It is also a slice of lost graphic design history worth reprising.
READ MORE | COMMENTS (7)
Places
Critical Beats
By Nancy LevinsonAlexandra Lange began her recent Observatory essay, "Why Nicolai Ouroussoff is Not Good Enough," with a provocative allusion to the possibility that the job of architecture critic "might be doomed," and that the current critic for the New York Times might be "the last architecture critic." Lange then concentrates on Ouroussoff's sensibility and approach, arguing eloquently that he is "making a poor case for keeping the breed." She doesn't really delve into whether the field has a future. So here we'd like to take up this thorny topic, and to suggest that architecture criticism, at least as practiced by our paper of record, is doomed, that in fact it's been losing force for years — and for reasons that have to do not just with the quality of the critical players but also with the rules of the critical game.
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Observatory
Death’s Bloom
By Adam Harrison Levy From 1913 to 1971 five thousand one hundred and twenty one mentally ill patients were cremated on the grounds of the Oregon State Hospital. Their remains were sealed in copper canisters. In 2000 they were removed from their institutional crypt, placed on plain pine shelves in a storeroom, and were left virtually forgotten until David Maisel heard of their existence and photographed them.
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By Eric BakerPlaces
The Architect as Urbanist: Part 1
By Robert BruegmannEarlier this week we featured Ian Baldwin's review of Paul Rudolph: Writings on Architecture. Now, continuing the focus on Rudolph, we present, in two parts, an essay by architectural historian Robert Bruegmann, originally published several years ago in a monograph on the architect's late work, by Roberto da Alba. "The Architect as Urbanist" reviews the architect's unusually volatile career, and offers a close and deeply observed reading of several of Rudolph's projects in southeast Asia. All were designed in the last decades of his life, and all have been comparatively neglected in the literature on an architect whose career is now exciting renewed interest — even as the built works continue to be demolished and threatened.
READ MORE | COMMENTS (1)
Other Recent Posts
PLACES: Designed Landscapes
PLACES: Thomas Schumacher Symposium
CHANGE OBSERVER: The Butterfly People
PLACES: The Architect as Urbanist: Part 2
PLACES: This Place is a Message
PLACES: Introducing MIT's New Media Lab Complex
CHANGE OBSERVER: The Nano Effect on Urban India
PLACES: Reading Rudolph
OBSERVATORY: Why Nicolai Ouroussoff Is Not Good Enough
OBSERVATORY: Today, 02.27.10
RECENT HIGHLIGHTS
Alexandra Lange
Why Nicolai Ouroussoff Is Not Good Enough
Nancy Levinson
Critical Beats
Justin Kemerling
The Volunteer Design Chronicles
ADS VIA THE DECK
DESIGN OBSERVER JOBS
Places: From the Archive
Climate Change and PlaceFall 2008
Observations on the Concepts of Place in Post-Risk Societies
The New U.S. Embassy in Berlin
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Change Observer: Resources
Academic Programs >>Competitions >>
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Audio: Design Matters Archive
Todd Pruzan & Sam PottsTodd Pruzan is an editor and writer, and Sam Potts is designer and writer.
Listen >>
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Observatory Archive
Books + Store: Books Received
In Pursuit of EleganceMatthew E. May
Innovation X
Adam Richardson
Integral Lars Müller
Lars Müller
I LEGO N.Y.
Christoph Niemann
The Oxford Companion to the Book
Michael F. Suarez & H. R. Woudhuysen
The Good Men Project
T. Matlack, J. Houghton & L. Bean
What Would Google Do?
Jeff Jarvis
Clever: Leading Your Smartest, Most Creative People
Rob Goffee & Gareth Jones
Innovation Tournaments
Christian Terwiesch & Karl Ulrich
How The Mighty Fall: And Why Some Companies Never Give In
Jim Collins
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Recommended Books
An Oresteia: Agamemnon by Aiskhylos; Elektra by Sophokles; Orestes by Euripides
Anne Carson
Translator Carson creates a unified Greek dramatic trilogy out of the work of three ancient playwrights, Aiskhylos, Sophokles, and Euripides; the stunning language helps the violence find its plateau quickly and keeps it there, hovering. Battlestar Galactica fans will find their show's seeds here. [ME]
Buy This Book >>
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Anne Carson
Translator Carson creates a unified Greek dramatic trilogy out of the work of three ancient playwrights, Aiskhylos, Sophokles, and Euripides; the stunning language helps the violence find its plateau quickly and keeps it there, hovering. Battlestar Galactica fans will find their show's seeds here. [ME]
Buy This Book >>
More Recommended Books >>
Conundrums: Typographic Conundrums
Harry Pearce
Using just one box per conundrum, two colors and a single typeface, Pentagram’s Harry Pearce, has authored and designed a very entertaining book. Full of great visual puzzles, there is plenty of exercise for the brain, fun for the funny bone, and candy for the eyes. A very nice little gift book indeed. [JSC]
Buy This Book >>
More Recommended Books >>
Harry Pearce
Using just one box per conundrum, two colors and a single typeface, Pentagram’s Harry Pearce, has authored and designed a very entertaining book. Full of great visual puzzles, there is plenty of exercise for the brain, fun for the funny bone, and candy for the eyes. A very nice little gift book indeed. [JSC]
Buy This Book >>
More Recommended Books >>
Abstract Comics
Andrei Molotiu, editor
Though "abstract comics" are (according to the editor) "sequential art consisting exclusively of abstract imagery" which may also "contain some representational elements as long as those elements do not cohere into a narrative or even into a unified narrative space," this arresting book is like a scoop of primordial narrative, representational mud. Which is to say, it has vitaminic powers. [ME]
Buy This Book >>
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Andrei Molotiu, editor
Though "abstract comics" are (according to the editor) "sequential art consisting exclusively of abstract imagery" which may also "contain some representational elements as long as those elements do not cohere into a narrative or even into a unified narrative space," this arresting book is like a scoop of primordial narrative, representational mud. Which is to say, it has vitaminic powers. [ME]
Buy This Book >>
More Recommended Books >>
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