OBSERVERS ROOM : ALEXANDRA LANGE

Onesies and Crime

I'm with Adolf Loos. The way we ornament our baby clothes is a design crime.
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OBSERVERS ROOM : HELEN WALTERS

The Rotman Design Challenge: A Review

In recent years, calls for a more creative or innovative approach to, well, pretty much everything but our financial instruments, have become more pointed. As the western economy in particular has evolved away from its industrial roots and as the Internet has wrought digital havoc on the old, understood ways of doing things, so have many accepted that the education of those who will effectively lead progress toward a healthy, sustainable future must also shift — and fast.
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PLACES : ANURADHA MATHUR

Visualizing Landscapes: In the Terrain of Water

For millennia water has been celebrated in cultures worldwide; today it is increasingly central to professional and scientific discussions about global sustainability. "Is it time, then, to rethink our relationship to water and how we imagine both its presence and absence in design? Can new attitudes, questions, and techniques of visualization aid us in this creative endeavor?" These are some of the questions that have inspired a new exhibition, now at Penn Design, curated by Anuradha Mathur.
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OBSERVERS ROOM : JULIE LASKY

Search for the Obvious: Challenge #2

Once again, Acumen Fund is looking for creative solutions to social problems. This time the focus is on mothers.
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OBSERVERS ROOM : JOHN THACKARA

Utopia is Here

Ridley Scott's film Blade Runner, made in 1982, portrays a dystopian Los Angeles as it might be in 2019. In just eight years from now we are due to discover and find out whether or not the film was an accurate prediction.
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OBSERVERS ROOM : MARK LAMSTER

Paul Rudolph's Knock-Up Masterpiece

Take a ride down Sanibel Island's West Gulf Drive and you will find, lining its exclusive beachfront, one McMansion after the next, a palisade of Classical, Victorian, and Spanish Colonials with multi-car garages behind their landscaped gates. There is but one exception: Paul Rudolph's Walker Guest House, a simple wood-frame box built in the early 1950s, when Sanibel was a remote island redoubt accessible only by boat, and a stay on its beach occasioned no great ceremony or ostentation.
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PLACES : JONATHAN MASSEY

Breuer, Baby!

For a few weeks this winter, the architecture school at Syracuse University was host to the exhibition "Marcel Breuer and Postwar America," curated by architecture students under the direction of faculty member Jonathan Massey and MoMA curator Barry Bergdoll. With its focus on lesser known works — even as the fate of Breuer's Whitney Museum remains uncertain — the exhibition illuminates unfamiliar dimensions of the great architect's legacy. As Massey says, "When you look afresh at Breuer, you find that his work unsettles what you thought you knew about postwar modernism."
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CHANGE OBSERVER: PROJECT ARCHIVE

Roudha Center

Report on Roudha Center, a proposal for a one-stop hub for Qatari women to learn the nuts and bolts of launching a business
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OBSERVATORY ARCHIVE

PLACES ARCHIVE: WINTER 1983

In No Order Whatsoever

Just before his death in 1984, the influential urban planner Kevin Lynch compiled a list of topics he thought important for the future of cities. The list is as relevant as ever.
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In and Out with Dick and Jane: A Loving Parody
Ross MacDonald & James Victore

The Pencil of Nature
William Henry Fox Talbot

GPO: Design
Paul Rennie

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