andrea fineman dot com

Oct 14

Architecture panel at the Boston Book Festival this Saturday

Moshe Safdie and Erik Kuhne will be speaking on a panel entitled Architecture: Writing on the Walls at the Boston Book Festival this Saturday at 3pm.

One of Safdie's several Boston-area projects: the Class of 1959 Chapel at Harvard

One of Safdie’s several Boston-area projects: the Class of 1959 Chapel at Harvard

Oct 13

Full, searchable 1990s-era issues of Spin Magazine, thanks to Google Books -

Searching Google Books for a German textbook, I found this scan of Spin Magazine, on page 38 of which I found a comparison chart, describing two unknown blond teen singers—Britney Spears and Shelby Starner (who I had never heard of). It turns out this girl recorded an album with the Red Hot Chili Peppers (which was never released), then died of bulimia in 2003. I wonder how future historians will deal with the vast availability of fascinating cultural minutiae like this.

Oct 03

“an unpretentious Giverny of the California interstate” — on Sacramento. from a New York Times article on Wayne Thiebaud

Aug 23

Design Research Building, Cambridge, MA

This past week, Anthropologie opened a new location in Harvard Square, on Brattle St., in the Design Research Building. (The space, on the first floor, was previously a Crate and Barrel.)

The building, above, was designed in 1969 by Ben Thompson, an architect and member of The Architects Collaborative, a Cambridge-based architecture firm notable for including Walter Gropius, who is in turn notable for having founded the Bauhaus, and who came to teach at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design after the Bauhaus shut down under pressure from the Nazis. The Design Research Building is so-called after Thompson’s furniture and housewares store, founded in 1953, which is credited with sparking a revolution in popular taste. In a new book, Alexandra Lange argues that Design Research’s pioneering of modern housewares and furniture paved the way for such stores as, appropriately, Crate and Barrel. Both Lange and a recent Globe article mention the U.S. debut of Marimekko products at DR as one of Thompson’s greatest coups; however, in an article on Fast Company, Lange lists a number of products (some familiar, some not) that Thompson’s store popularized. Design Research's former home, in a wooden building on Brattle St. that is no longer with us

[Above: Design Research’s original home, a wooden building on Brattle St. that is no longer with us]

Boston is home to more than a few modernist landmarks—some beloved, some very much not. The idea of recognizing and preserving modernist buildings as landmarks can be controversial. Many find the buildings unremarkable or even ugly, and unworthy of historical landmark designation because of their relative newness. What do you think?

Aug 18

More high-profile graffiti art in metro Boston (sort of)

“Matthew Perpetua: Yeah, this was truly the era when even macho rock gods were earnestly trying to write feminist songs. I wanted to do a 33 1/3 book on Vitalogy and a lot of it was going to be trying to figure out why all of this liberalism in popular rock music abruptly fell out of favor in 1995/1996.” — Interview with Rob Sheffield on Fluxblog

Aug 16

A TV Commercial from 1995 starring Tina Fey -

tina fey

“Hey baby I hear the blues are calling, tossed salad and scrambled eggs”

Sol Lewitt

I like this Sol Lewitt mural in the lobby of 100 Cambridge St. in Boston (near City Hall Plaza).

100 Cambridge St.

There are a few other places in the northeast where Sol Lewitt’s murals can be seen (besides, of course, the warehouse full of his works at MASS MoCA). Here’s a mural at the Wadsworth Athenaeum (in Lewitt’s hometown of Hartford, CT):

Hartford