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Frank Stella, to the envy of many, is that rarest of artists: one who has known little of failure. His initial, post-collegiate efforts—the “Black Paintings”—met with almost immediate commercial success and critical acclaim. And since this auspicious start, his stature and influence have only increased over his nearly 50-year career. No serious museum of contemporary art can be without a Stella in its collection, and his works routinely fetch seven figures at auction.
While Stella (b. 1936; Malden, Mass.) is best known as a painter of flat (and, famously, shaped) canvases, he began introducing relief into his work as early as the 1970’s—and by the 1990’s, sculpture became, and remains, a major part of his output. And as Stella himself puts it, “It’s hard not to think about architecture when you’ve gone from painting to relief to sculpture.”
Indeed, architecture has been a serious focus of his now for nearly 20 years—and his achievements in this area, at least in the eyes of curators at the world’s most prestigious museum, merited a solo exhibition: “Frank Stella: Painting into Architecture,” which recently ran at New York’s the Metropolitan Museum of Art for three months. (A companion show, “Frank Stella on the Roof,” is on view through Oct. 28, 2007.)
In an essay titled The Plight of the Prosperous,” published in 1950 in this magazine, Lewis Mumford dismissed the living accommodations of upscale New Yorkers as little better than slums. “I sometimes wonder what self-hypnosis has led the well-to-do citizens of New York, for the last seventy-five years, to accept the quarters that are offered them with the idea that they are doing well by themselves,” he wrote. The typical Upper East Side apartment, he said, was dark, airless, and badly laid out. Mumford was mostly right, but, by the time he was writing, design and construction standards were heading downhill so fast that the prewar buildings he was sneering at had come to evoke the grand living of a bygone era.
Today, if you want such luxuries as high ceilings and a dining room, an old building is pretty much the only place to find them. Forget Richard Meier and Jean Nouvel and their sleek glass condominiums: for connoisseurs of Manhattan apartments, the real celebrity architects have always been Rosario Candela, J. E. R. Carpenter, and Emery Roth, who designed the best buildings put up between the wars. That period—when Roth built the San Remo, on Central Park West, while Candela produced the sombre citadels of 740 Park Avenue and 834, 960, and 1040 Fifth Avenue—ended up being the glory years. Such buildings still represent the apogee of New York residential design. Brokers often mention Candela in their ads, because people will pay a premium to live in one of his buildings.
Can't Get Used To Losing You
Andy Williams/English Beat
Words and Music by Doc Pomus and Mort Schuman
midi sound
DO Research (from justins links page - blogger pulls prefab and modern images from odd sources)
Politics, the political and design
Design, mostly, is a service industry, serving the status quo. It serves to replicate the given reality of our existence in which a ‘politics of the same’ — the only formal politics we have — is enacted. Obviously, this doesn’t happen in consciously overt ways, but rather through the inherent ontologically designing nature of design’s politically unexamined practices and the directional consequences of all that design brings into being. Or, put another way, ‘everything we design goes on designing’. What we are saying here then is that this designing is ever ideological, and this understanding of design, i.e., revealing the designed as continual process rather than just as realised product, is ever political.
It follows that if we want another kind of future than the one offered by the unsustainable status quo, then we all have to change direction, redirect our practices and all that they bring into being — this so we may become another way. Such change can only happen if design is not just acknowledged as political but also becomes politically engaged as an ethically redirective domain of human endeavour.
We cannot go back. While the overt political ideologies of the past have good and bad lessons to teach, they lack the conceptual and intellectual means to deliver sustainable futures. Likewise, democracy as we now know it — as just another marketed commodity choice based upon appeals to self interest rather than the collective good — is not going to deliver such futures. The massive changes needed to secure sustainable futures — such as major reductions in the negative impacts of economic activity, limits on resource utilisation and the initiation of socially just levels of equity — are not the kind of things that politicians are going to put in front of voters.
Just a few years ago, preservationists worried that the town's collection of modernist houses, one of Connecticut's historical treasures, was in danger of destruction.
The houses' very design - smaller, one-story structures built with natural materials that flow into the landscape - put them at risk of being torn down to make way for the larger McMansions that have become so popular.
But the death in 2005 of Philip Johnson, one of the most famous of the modernist architects, and the opening earlier this year of his world-famous Glass House in New Canaan for public tours, seems to be turning the tide in favor of the town's notable modernist homes, according to local history experts and preservationists.
"People are coming looking for these houses, so the tear-downs have slowed down," said Janet Lindstrom, executive director of the New Canaan Historical Society. "They seem to be much more respected. Many of them are in the process of being refurbished and it could be that maybe five years ago, they would have been torn down and lost to us forever."
But her focus remains on how a business that once catered to the wealthy elite has gone mass-market and the effects that democratization has had on the way ordinary people shop today, as conspicuous consumption and wretched excess have spread around the world. Labels, once discreetly stitched into couture clothes, have become logos adorning everything from baseball hats to supersized gold chains. Perfumes, once dreamed up by designers with an idea about a particular scent, are now concocted from briefs written by marketing executives brandishing polls and surveys and sales figures.
With globalization, Paris and New York are no longer exclusive luxury meccas. Ms. Thomas notes that a gigantic 690,000-square-foot luxury mall called Crocus City (featuring 180 boutiques, including Armani, Pucci and Versace) is flourishing outside Moscow, and that a group of high-end boutiques will be part of a luxury complex called Legation Quarter, scheduled to open in Tiananmen Square later this year.
“Approximately 40 percent of all Japanese own a Vuitton product” today, she says, and one recent poll showed that by 2004 the average American woman was buying more than four handbags a year. With more people visiting Caesars Palace’s glitzy Forum Shops each year than Disney World, Las Vegas has made shopping synonymous with gambling and entertainment, even as outlet malls have brought designer clothing and accessories within the reach (and budget) of many suburbanites.
High-profile luxury brands like Louis Vuitton, Hermès and Cartier were founded in the 18th or 19th centuries by artisans dedicated to creating beautiful, finely made wares for the royal court in France and later, with the fall of the monarchy, for European aristocrats and prominent American families. Luxury remained, writes Ms. Thomas, “a domain of the wealthy and the famous” until “the Youthquake of the 1960s” pulled down social barriers and overthrew elitism. It would remain out of style “until a new and financially powerful demographic — the unmarried female executive — emerged in the 1980s.”
the portland pullman (just needs paint)
via erin/steve
Sinatra, Streisand, Rosemary Clooney and Tony Bennett — even Fred Astaire — have all recorded their songs: The husband-and-wife team of Marilyn and Alan Bergman has been writing irresistible tunes together for 50 years.
Their songs include "Nice & Easy," "In the Heat of the Night" (recorded by Ray Charles), "That Face," "You Must Believe in Spring," "The Way We Were" and "What Are You Doing the Rest of Your Life?"; they've written the lyrics for music featured in films as diverse as Tootsie and the original Thomas Crown Affair.
Alan Bergman has recorded an album of their songs with the Berlin Radio Orchestra; it's called Lyrically.