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In preparation for “Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling,” a show on prefabricated housing that opens July 20, the Museum of Modern Art is letting the public in on the action. The museum has set up a Web site (momahomedelivery.org) that allows visitors to follow the process as five architectural teams create houses to be installed in outdoor space west of the museum’s main building. Every week until the show opens, each team will present progress reports, with photos, drawings and video clips of its efforts to make, ship and assemble the structures.
Donald Judd
Library desk B-vB 27/6, designed 1982
hardwoods, texas pine, and pine; shown in Douglas fir
30 x 88 x 44 inches
Description:
The full lines of metal and wood furniture by Donald Judd are available at Artware Editions.
Most pieces from the wood lines are available in a variety of different wood types and finishes, including Finland color ply in six colors (black, green, yellow, light brown, dark brown, or red), Birch plywood, Mahogany plywood, Texas pine, common pine and hardwoods (cherry, walnut, Sitka spruce, Douglas fir, alder, ash, maple and cypress).
A small selection of pieces is on view on our website. Please contact gallery for full details and pricing.
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longleaf yellow (texas) pine
But much of Starck’s playful ribbing was at the expense of the user. One could never find the door to the bathrooms in the Royalton lobby, for example, and the “flaming ornament” atop the roof of Japan’s Asahi Brewery building meant to symbolize the brewery’s dynamic heart but is far better known as the “golden turd.”
Starck’s furniture designs seemed clever the first time you saw them — lamps in the shape of guns, a chair with Louis XIV detailing, a cute (but pricey) gnome stool — but not so much the second time around.
His product design often entered the realm of pure silliness, perhaps epitomized by the goblet-shaped toddler sippy cup in plastic masquerading as crystal that Starck design for Target back in 2002. Or maybe the WW Stool he designed for Vitra, described as a stool or a “support for users who prefer to stand” priced at an astonishing $4,670. (I will give him a nod for his spider-legged juice squeezer for Alessi; if you’ll pardon the unpardonable pun, that design has legs.)
I write of Starck in the past tense because the increasingly cynical vibe of his creations seems to have caught up with him. In an interview with the German newspaper Die Zeit recently, Starck proclaimed that “everything that I designed is absolutely unnecessary.” This continued a jag of self-deprecation started at the TED conference in March, where Starck began by addressing his audience thusly: “I must tell you I am like that [indicates shaking hands], not very comfortable, because usually, in life, I think my job is absolutely useless.” Starck also announced his impending retirement (not effective immediately, but two years from now, so we can expect more of the same).
Now, for a designer of objects and things to announce that “we do not need anything material,” that all we need is “the ability to love,” makes for a delicious scandal. It also transforms Starck suddenly into the most unlikely of roles: an advocate for sustainability. This is all the more remarkable as Starck’s material of choice is, more often than not, the incredibly un-green polycarbonate.
In the future, promises Starck, “there will be no more designers.” And by extension, no more stuff! Now, that’s a surefire way to reduce one’s carbon footprint. (Will Starck now join the Designers Accord?) As is Starck’s prediction that the designer of the future is “a personal coach, the gym trainer, the diet consultant.” So not only will we consume less stuff (because no one is designing it), we’ll consume less food, too. Brilliant!
And that’s when I began to get suspicious.
For five weeks, until May 17, Storefront for Art and Architecture will operate this satellite space in a backroom of Paperchase Printing, a print shop in Hollywood with some room to spare because its digital printers take up less space than the ones they replaced.
On display will be "CCCP: Cosmic Communist Constructions Photographed," an exhibition of French photographer Frédéric Chaubin's images of Eastern Bloc buildings that went up in the 1970s and '80s -- the last two decades of the Cold War and the final years of the Soviet Union.
The two stories about threats to Bertrand Goldberg's architecture in today's Tribune reveal that Goldberg's architecture still speaks to us today. The question is: Why?
In the 1960s, Goldberg, once an acolyte of Mies van der Rohe, revolted against the master of steel and glass, as well as his devotion to the right angle. Goldberg shifted instead to curves and concrete, and the result was Marina City, including the corncob-shaped apartment towers along the Chicago River that are icons of the Chicago skyline.
on fucking up 2CC
The wraps are starting to come off 2 Columbus Circle, which will be reborn this fall as the Museum of Art and Design. Although it remains within the dimensions and footprint of the original, the structure, formerly home to the Huntington Hartford Museum, has been fundamentally changed inside and out — and the city is much the poorer for that.
Since its inauguration in 1964, this beleaguered building has been one of the most enduringly divisive structures in the city, if not the world. No sooner had it opened than the architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable dubbed it the "Venetian lollipop" building, because of the peculiar arcade at its base. And in the nearly half-century since, that label has stuck, like obscene graffiti smeared across its entrance — to be distinguished, naturally, from the actual graffiti smeared across its entrance. For the longest time, simply to mention "the lollipop building" passed for taste and discernment in matters of architecture and design.
Why did "everyone" hate this building, the loving labor of Edward Durrell Stone, one of America's most eminent Modernist architects? Back in 1964, its tentative embrace of historicism, contextualism, and even irony — qualities later embraced by the Postmodernists — seemed heretical and appalling. It felt like decades since anyone had had the gall and poor judgment to attempt something other than a glass and steel curtain wall.
Often overlooked, however, is that even back then there were people [me] who quite liked the building. Even if its embrace of Venetian and Byzantine motifs was halfhearted at best, still there was a positive enchantment to the place, a sense — and here I draw upon memories from my own childhood — that architecture could open up whole new worlds to the receptive soul. Unlike most buildings in Manhattan, 2 Columbus Circle presented a smooth, windowless expanse of gleaming white marble, qualified by adorable round portholes along the sides and ruddy granite accents. Imagine a Modernist re-enactment of a Venetian palazzo dropped into one of the busiest intersections in the busiest city in the world and encircled, like an island, by the ceaseless flow of traffic rather than the green waters of the Grand Canal!