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Rehabilitating Cambridge's Fresh Pond: A conversation with the landscape architects of CRJA

Mon, 19 Sep 2011 21:56:00 -0400

See my original post at Design Museum Boston’s website.

When most people hear the words “landscape architecture,” an image of a team of men with rakes and leaf blowers comes to mind. Few outside the design community may be familiar with the rich theoretical underpinnings of the architectural discipline of landscape design, which are still being formed in architecture schools across the country. Though all designers must solve concrete problems while producing an aesthetically pleasing solution, landscape designers have a particular relationship to the physical reality of the sites they develop. Keeping in mind the topography, climate, flora, and fauna of a site, as well as the engineering requirements for any nearby buildings, roads, or other infrastructure, landscape architects must find a way to accommodate a client’s goals while building a beautiful outdoor environment.

The meadow at Fresh Pond.

For the team at Carol R. Johnson Associates, rehabilitating the Fresh Pond Reservation required an ability to balance aesthetics, biology, engineering, and public opinion. Large portions of the land along the northeast shore of Fresh Pond had been environmentally devastated from being used as a construction staging area—parts of the reservation served as a parking area for construction vehicles and a storage spot for thousands of pounds of dirt. The area serves as an important stop for migrating birds along a path called the Atlantic Flyway—and bird population counts were in serious decline after years of construction and demolition around Fresh Pond. The goal was not only to restore the reservation to a more natural state while providing parkland for the citizens of Cambridge: CRJA also had to design the landscape in such a way that runoff from nearby Concord Avenue could be filtered before reaching the pond.

“The client for the reservation is the Cambridge Water Department, who manages the drinking water,” said CRJA’s John Amodeo. “So even though most people consider Fresh Pond Reservation a park, what it really is is a buffer between the developed city and the reservoir. It just so happens that it also serves as a public amenity for recreation.”

After years of research, planning, and construction, CRJA and the other consultants who worked on the project created a soccer field, community garden, hiking trails, and a parking lot, as well as a wetland and meadows tucked away inside the 25 acre plot. With such a varied program, Amodeo and his colleagues had to negotiate with a number of parties, all with different priorities. For many members of the community, the focus was on recreation—aesthetics, not to mention water filtration and wildlife, were not always at the forefront of the conversation.

“We had many public meetings where we talked about the design,” said Amodeo. “The public was very interested in a youth soccer field, and they were also interested in a community garden. To many people, those things are beautiful, particularly to the people who use those things. And so the soccer field and the community garden were at odds with the natural landscape character we were trying to achieve. So that’s where the balancing act came in. What we decided to do was create a transition from the chaos of the built environment into the calmness of the natural environment—we didn’t want to have people come walking through woodland trails and around meadows and then suddenly have to come upon a soccer field. We did it in reverse. We put the soccer field and the community garden close to Concord Avenue and the entrance into the site. … Once you get farther into the site it becomes more and more natural; you put the man-made things behind you and you get into an increasingly more natural environment.”

Some Cantabridgians were skeptical of landscape features like the meadow and wetland.

“We had to actually teach the local community as to the value of these kinds of natural landscapes that we wanted to establish here,” said Amodeo. “We didn’t have to educate our client; they said… ‘our master plan is looking for a natural aesthetic’ and we said, ‘We’re the people for you.’ Because we know that aesthetic very well.”

According to Amodeo, many skeptics were won over once the project was finished. “The wetland became a natural aviary,” he says. “If you go to the wetland on any given day from spring to fall, possibly even in the winter … there will be birds swooping in and out of that wetland. It looks like it’s choreographed—it’s just beautiful, birds of all sizes, the songbirds that had been missing from that part of Fresh Pond have returned.”

Though the area that CRJA reconstructed covered only 25 acres, the detailed nature of the project required intense mapping and evaluation of every bush and tree on site. Survey and civil engineers, ecological restoration experts, and soil scientists worked with the architects at CRJA on a number of fronts. Experts created a log of invasive species of plants and cleared them away, while planting regionally-appropriate plants in their stead. Different combinations of soil were formulated for different regions of the park. “Soil is not a one-size-fits-all,” said Amodeo. Soil scientists developed recipes for the wetland, meadow, and other areas that had to be built up or re-planted. “It told you how many strokes,” said Amodeo’s colleague Ruth Loetterle, of the soil recipes. “There’s very specific ways the backhoe goes down, this way and that, to get a nice blend. It’s very tricky.”

It may seem like a long distance from the study of columns and arches to the development of topsoil recipes, but an interest in traditional architecture was John Amodeo’s entrée into the field of landscape design. “I came into landscape architecture sort of through a back door, as actually many landscape architects do,” Amodeo said. “Because landscape architecture, at least when I was in elementary school and high school, was not a well-known profession.” Having taken an architectural design class in high school, Amodeo developed a particular interest in a building’s relationship to its site. Of his high school elective, Amodeo said, “I went up to my teacher and I said, ‘I’m just really interested in working with the land. Is there a specialization in architecture that deals with just the outside of the building and the land?’ And he said, almost with disdain, ‘well there’s something called landscape architecture.’ … And the light bulb went off in my head. I didn’t know what it is but that’s what I wanted to be.”

Since then, Amodeo has worked on projects with CRJA for organizations like universities and corporate complexes, but also such unexpected clients as the federal prison system. Though many landscape architects may be hired purely for their ability to create beautiful landscapes for resorts or corporate campuses, Amodeo and his colleagues are often engaged for environmental reasons. Those outside the landscape architecture community may be surprised to learn how much of CRJA’s work is focused on landscape design that is invisible to the naked eye. At a federal prison in Devens, Mass., CRJA created a wetland to manage storm water on the prison grounds.

“The federal prison system had never done that. They manage prisoners, they don’t manage storm water,” said Amodeo. The clients with the federal prison system may not have foreseen the environmental precautions CRJA were to recommend. Amodeo and his colleagues made a number of changes to the site in order to protect the area’s wildlife. “We ended up using light that didn’t pollute the sky, for dark sky concerns. You know a lot of light fixtures that prisons like to use are like what Fenway Park uses for a night game—big flood lights—and we had woodlands that had wildlife that would have their nocturnal habits disturbed by floodlights,” said Amodeo. “It was the first time the federal prison system used cutoff light fixtures that did not allow for light to escape.

Though a prison landscape project may not seem like a portfolio standout for a designer, Amodeo and his colleagues were proud of the work they did at Devens. “You think a prison project doesn’t sound too sexy for a landscape architect, but it’s been a project that we’ve won awards for, it’s helped get us other jobs, I got to learn about constructed wetlands and so I could apply that knowledge to Fresh Pond… It’s amazing how you can make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear,” said Amodeo.

Today, thanks to the expertise of Amodeo, Loetterle, and their colleagues at CRJA, Fresh Pond enjoys an active community of human and animal visitors, year-round. The Cambridge Water Department and other organizations host guided tours and nature walks, and dog-walkers frequent the footpaths around the pond. Many are surely unaware of the painstaking research and design that brought the pond’s wild environs to life—and with this, Amodeo and his colleagues’ aesthetic goals are achieved.

Understanding the Arabic world through typography

Mon, 12 Sep 2011 11:03:00 -0400

See my original post at Design Museum Boston’s blog.

A page from Rana Abou Rjeily’s Cultural Connectives, a book comparing the Arabic and English languages.

The Arabic language is a formidable goal for any language learner, particularly because of its script. The cursive script used throughout the Arab world for all types of written communication bears little resemblance to the Latin script used throughout the west.

The typographer and graphic designer Rana Abou Rjeily, like many designers, is attempting to unite two disparate cultures using the power of design. Her recent book Cultural Connectives serves as an introduction to the Arabic language for English speakers. In a recent interview with the New Yorker’s Book Bench blog, she talks about her choices in designing the typeface she uses in the book, which contains character sets in both Arabic and Latin styles. The Arabic letters in the typeface, which she calls Mirsaal, can be used in a traditional cursive style or with each Arabic letter detached, in the style of western printing.

The 20th century saw many non-western societies examining their own languages and writing systems, in an effort to simplify global communication, modernize nations, and reform education. The Chinese Simplified character set was developed in the 1950s and ’60s in an effort to increase literacy among mainland Chinese. Originally theorized in the first decades of the century by anti-imperialist intellectuals seeking to modernize the Chinese state, the simplified character set was taken up by Mao’s government mid-century as well.

In the Arabic-speaking world, the idea of using a non-cursive or detached script is a bit more controversial. Twentieth-century reformers have proposed simplified or detached typefaces, including social proposals involving multi-stage transitions from traditional type to fully detached letters. Rjeily writes that some are opposed to the teaching of an Arabic script with detached letters, because Arabic’s cultural heritage lies in the cursive style. Mirsaal strives to bridge the gap using line weights and character widths that are easily legible when detached while also supporting a cursive style.

"I haven’t changed my mind about modernism from the first day I ever did it… It means..."

Tue, 23 Aug 2011 12:33:25 -0400

“I haven’t changed my mind about modernism from the first day I ever did it… It means integrity; it means honesty; it means the absence of sentimentality and the absence of nostalgia; it means simplicity; it means clarity. That’s what modernism means to me.”

- Paul Rand

Field Trip: Philip Johnson's Glass House

Wed, 10 Aug 2011 11:06:00 -0400

See my original post at Design Museum Boston’s website.

The Glass House from behind.

Though the state may not be thought of as a cultural epicenter, Connecticut is home to a number of architectural masterpieces. In western Connecticut in particular, the architectural tourist can find dozens of modernist homes, both experimental and functional. The most famous of them all may be Philip Johnson’s Glass House, built in 1949 as Johnson’s own residence in New Canaan, CT.

Johnson, born in 1906 in Ohio, is often lumped in with such masters as Mies van der Rohe and Louis I. Kahn, and the influence of those two architects is clear in the 47-acre Glass House estate. Indeed, the centerpiece of the campus is based off Mies’s Farnsworth House—while Johnson was sifting through Mies’s work in preparation for an exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, Johnson was inspired to build his own residence using the plate glass that Mies and the other Modernists popularized in the first half of the 20th century.

Despite Johnson’s having failed to produce a large number of internationally-recognized public projects, the Glass House serves as an icon of mid-century modern architecture. Less well-known, however, are the other buildings, sculptures, and monuments that dot the Glass House landscape.

The Glass House’s “back yard” — at left, the Kirsten monument, and at right, the pavilion.

I found Johnson’s Kirstein monument (named after his friend, the writer, art collector, and Balanchine patron Lincoln Kirstein) and the “pavilion,” a small (5 foot tall) structure based on Lincoln Center’s design, to be particularly notable. The Kirstein monument includes stairs so that the viewer can climb to the top of the tower. The pavilion similarly was intended for adults and children to play on. Though the surroundings may look wild at first glance, Johnson meticulously engineered the land in order to create an idealized version of the chiefly English concept of a wild, picturesque landscape. Different patches of mown versus tall grasses and precisely planted stands of trees and bushes add variety to what was a dense wood when Johnson bought the property over 60 years ago.

The famously spare interior of the Glass House leaves the visitor wondering how Johnson accomplished day-to-day tasks like cooking, laundry, and working on architectural plans. A separate structure down the hill from the Glass House served as Johnson’s studio and library when he stayed in New Canaan. (He often spent the week in New York City, returning to the Glass House for weekends.) The tour guide assured us that Johnson’s small kitchen was intended for martinis only.

Johnson’s martini bar and kitchen, inside the Glass House.

Naturally, a house in the style of the Glass House could only be successful on a large plot of land—few partitions or shelves exist inside the house to shield inhabitants from the neighbors and the street.

Johnson’s bed.

Even Johnson, however, sought to enclose the bathroom from the landscape.

Johnson’s bathroom, located in a cylindrical structure inside the Glass House. This interior structure also includes the fireplace and chimney.

Letterpress at Target

Tue, 05 Jul 2011 08:07:00 -0400

(cross-posted from my posts on the Design Museum Boston blog)

Letterpress is moving deeper into the mainstream. The makers of the documentary film Typeface, about a former wood type factory and museum struggling to stay afloat, have teamed up with Target to create a line of clothing with letterpress-inspired designs. In a video, Target’s design team and the Hamilton Wood Type Museum’s directors discuss the unique shapes and textures the museum has to offer graphic designers.

For those who aren’t schooled in archaic printing techniques, letterpress is a printing method that uses individual wooden letters and characters that are arranged by hand into pages of text, and then stamped onto paper. The time-consuming technique fell by the wayside as innovations like offset printing allowed for more automation and efficient mass production. The old wooden forms, previously indispensable to presses around the country, started finding their ways into antique fairs or were treated as garbage as dozens of wood-type printing presses went out of business. Nowadays, letterpress machines are mostly used for fancy wedding invitations or for home decor.

For those who are interested in learning the technique or buying letterpress goods, there’s no shortage of letterpress resources in Boston.

Another modernist touchstone bites the dust

Mon, 04 Apr 2011 16:55:39 -0400

Did you miss your chance to celebrate the 39th anniversary of the demolition of the Pruitt-Igoe housing project? The St. Louis housing towers, built in the early 1950s, were demolished on March 16, 1972 (above), an event widely considered the death of modernism in architecture. (The architect behind Pruitt-Igoe, Minoru Yamasaki, designed another famously short-lived structure: the World Trade Center.) Chicago’s Cabrini-Green housing complex is often considered in the same vein as Pruitt-Igoe, and Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art is hosting a live video feed of the demolition of its last high-rise this month. Through April 24, the museum is sponsoring a public art show of LED lights which will be visible on the video feed from 7pm to 1am (central time) each day.

Below: the last housing tower at Cabrini-Green, site of the Museum of Contemporary Art’s light installation

"Our current e-books, he writes, are fine at the basic function of letting us read a text. They’re..."

Tue, 08 Mar 2011 13:43:46 -0500

“Our current e-books, he writes, are fine at the basic function of letting us read a text. They’re very bad, however, at something that physical books are good at: gathering “metadata” about our reading — broken spines, dog-eared chapters, marginalia.”

- James Bridle, via Sam Anderson, in the New York Times

Design and the written word

Mon, 07 Mar 2011 12:04:00 -0500

If there’s one thing designers love to do when they’re not creating graphics and drawing up plans, it’s expressing themselves in written form. It stands to reason that your favorite architects and graphic designers might have something to say about the written works of others. Launched early last month, Designers & Books lists the favorite books of a number of internationally-known designers, including Milton Glaser, Stefan Sagmeister, and Robert Venturi, to name a few. If you’re ever curious about which texts inspired the creators of the Institute of Contemporary Art or the architect behind MIT’s Simmons Hall, you now know where to look.

For more on design and authorship, MIT’s Department of Architecture is hosting a symposium this Saturday entitled Beyond the Author. From their site:

Roland Barthes’ Death of the Author paved the way for a proliferation of studies that problematize, dismantle or critically reinforce the notion of individual or group authorship in art and architecture production. Established authors are questioned and replaced by multiple actors; agents perceived as incapable of intentional creative practices are re-conceptualized as true authors. Criticism of received notions of author and authorship advanced to the center of scholarly arguments in relation to both contemporary and pre-modern subjects.

It’s Saturday, March 5, from 9am to 6pm—details here.

"He definitely presents an image of the literary life as something fun and entertaining, which might..."

Sun, 27 Feb 2011 12:21:31 -0500

““He definitely presents an image of the literary life as something fun and entertaining, which might save a few people from going into investment banking.””

- Wendy Lesser, the editor of the Threepenny Review, a literary journal, on Lorin Stein, editor of the Paris Review.

USPS unveils "Pioneers of American Industrial Design"

Sat, 15 Jan 2011 11:23:00 -0500

The United States Postal Service’s recent announcement of this year’s slate of commemorative stamps is making waves beyond the hardcore philately community. This year, in addition to Ronald Reagan and Tito Puente, the “Pioneers of American Industrial Design,” including Norman Bell Geddes and Raymond Loewy, will be celebrated with images of the household objects they designed. According to MediaBistro’s UnBeige blog, the designers and objects were chosen by USPS Art Director Derry Noyes, daughter of Eliot Noyes, whose work is included in the set.

It seems that the stamps will hit the market in July. I’ll definitely be buying some.

I. M. Pei's Terminal 6 at JFK to be demolished

Fri, 19 Nov 2010 10:46:37 -0500

A recent news item in Preservation Magazine brought to my attention this planned demolition at JFK airport in New York City. I. M. Pei’s Terminal 6, built in 1970 for National Airlines and used in the past few years by JetBlue, sits next to Eero Saarinen’s Terminal 5, another architectural landmark. According to Port Authority, the space could be converted into a parking lot or a space to de-ice planes. Preservationists aren’t happy, and neither is Pei’s firm, Pei, Cobb, Fried, and Partners.

One of Pei’s buildings here in metro Boston is equally in danger of destruction. His Polaroid headquarters, on Route 128 in Waltham, was abandoned a couple of years ago and now is full of graffiti and broken windows. Weeds cover formerly paved areas around the compound. Plans to redevelop the site stalled after the financial meltdown.

You can atone for Port Authority’s sins by making a pilgrimage to some of his many offerings here in Boston. The John Hancock building in Copley Square, the JFK Presidential Library, the west wing of the Museum of Fine Arts, the Christian Science center, and a host of buildings across Harvard and MIT’s campuses were designed by Pei and his firm. (His firm also developed the master plan for Government Center—something preservationists might hesitate to draw attention to.)

Boston City Hall: The ideology behind the infamous landmark

Sat, 13 Nov 2010 10:08:12 -0500

This is a post I wrote for the blog at Design Museum Boston. It’s part of a series on Boston City Hall.

“Architecture is not about self-expression,” said Gerhard Kallmann, the architect who, along with partner Michael McKinnell, designed Boston City Hall. Unlike painting and sculpture, architecture rarely wears its message on its sleeve. Though architectural movements are fraught with ideology, the average citizen, government bureaucrat, or mayor isn’t likely to read the story of decades of architectural and sociological debate in the design of one of the city’s most unloved buildings. It may come as a surprise to some that City Hall, a building often described as dark, damp, and poorly ventilated stems from a tradition that sought to create utopian communities and facilitate more hygienic lifestyles for all.

The Brutalist style, so called after the French term for raw concrete (beton brut) was pioneered by Le Corbusier, the Swiss architect responsible for many modernist landmarks in Europe and Asia (though his only North American work was 1963’s Carpenter Center at Harvard University). Buildings like Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation (finished 1952), a Marseille housing tower that included shops and services along a “street in the sky” on the seventh and eighth floors, sought to create safe, clean villages closed off from crime and smoggy streets below. [See image below.] The raw concrete style was deemed “honest,” un-bourgeois, and was relatively affordable to boot. The lack of traditional ornament in Brutalist structures only contributed to the “honest” aspect of the design—these architects avoided any structure or design that in some way masked the functions of the buildings they designed.

Kallmann absolutely adhered to the idea that architecture should be “programmatic”—that is, designed only to support a building’s function, without the architect’s artistic motifs applied in a way that doesn’t support or enhance those functions. In a 2004 interview with the Boston Globe, Kallmann said he and McKinnell were “not interested in abstract space exercises or special sensation, but in establishing a space and identity for the human being who works in a particular context.” Like other Brutalists, he similarly avoided using historical styles just for aesthetic purposes. In an article entitled “Action Architecture,” published before the 1961 competition held by the mayor’s office to find a design for city hall, Kallmann wrote that he strove for a “new” solidity—instead of the geometric, symmetrical forms of classicism, or the weightless, all-glass look of early modernism, he sought “a levitation of masses in which there are now only degrees of density, ranging from apparent solidity through hollowness or openness to complete attenuation of the void.”

The building is absolutely a product of its time—said Kallmann in 2004, “Remember, this was the time of optimism, of Jack Kennedy. We wanted a modern building that acknowledges surroundings and also long-past history in the recall of ancient precedents, of ramparts and templelike structures. It wasn’t just minimalist modern architecture. Besides, if we made a square, glass building, it would have looked like any other corporation office.”

Some aspects of City Hall’s design are rather literal, to those in the know. The middle floors, which are emphasized with larger windows and protruding forms, house the mayor’s and city council’s chambers. Below, at ground level, multi-story archways and openings represent a transparent and welcoming government to citizens arriving for business. On the upper level, where the windows and other elements of the façade are placed on an even, repetitive grid, the bureaucratic agencies are housed. “The discipline of the upper structure, in contrast to the variety of places and fascination of shape at the pedestrian level, has been described as ‘a brilliant demonstration of the principle of order in the sky and tumult on the ground,” said the architectural historian Paul Heyer in praise of the hierarchical layout of the building.

The idea that such a heavy, imposing building could represent transparency might seem a bit counterintuitive. Said Kallmann, “In the design of our building, the very first idea was accessibility of government. To have accessibility, a building need not be of glass architecture, which is more appropriate for shops, where you want to display things. A building can be accessible and permeable by other means. City Hall was meant as an extension of the city streets. In sketches, we showed passage through the building and down to Dock Square. When the riots of the 1960s came, the doors were closed.” Other more friendly elements of the building’s original design were quashed as well. A beer garden, planned for the ground floor of the building, was prohibited by the federal government. Other balconies and courtyards, once open to the public, have been barricaded for security reasons. Even a fountain, on the brick plaza in front of the building, was filled with cement after years of breakdowns and faulty machinery.

Though loved by architects and historians for its place in modern history, the barren brick plaza surrounding the building and the deteriorating, poorly-ventilated interiors of City Hall have inspired criticisms from City Hall employees, urban planners, community activists, and everyday citizens alike. Always a topic of debate and a candidate for reform, it seems that in the current economic climate, City Hall won’t be relocating or getting torn down anytime soon.

Boston City Hall: How did we end up with such a controversial public building?

Thu, 28 Oct 2010 12:14:29 -0400

This is a post I wrote for the blog at Design Museum Boston. It’s part of a series on Boston City Hall.

It’s a perennial topic of conversation in architectural circles: what to do about City Hall? Both the building and the surrounding plaza draw ire from government officials, citizens, and design aficionados alike. On the occasion of the opening of Design Museum Boston’s exhibit Creative Capital: Designed in Boston on City Hall’s 9th floor, we’re taking a look at City Hall itself. Today’s post is the first in a series on Boston City Hall. In the past several years, Boston City Hall has been named an “ugliest building” and chosen for the Project for Public Spaces’ “Hall of Shame.” Mayor Menino has even proposed selling the site and building a new city hall in the Seaport District. (Architects claim that demolishing the cast-cement structure could be a task too daunting for developers to undertake.) The building is the product of a 1961 competition initiated by Mayor John F. Collins. The first competition project for a major American city hall in decades (the previous one was San Francisco’s, in 1901), Collins and his advisers were inspired to undertake a competition after the success of competitions for such projects as St. Louis’s Gateway Arch (1947) and Sydney’s Opera House (1955). Entries had to conform to a number of regulations, including a height maximum (so as not to block the view of nearby Faneuil Hall). The jury, made up of architects and captains of industry, ultimately selected a proposal by relative newcomers—Columbia University professors Gerhard Kallmann and Michael McKinnell. Later responsible for such local landmarks as Back Bay Station and the DeCordova Museum, Kallmann and McKinnell adhered to a style that, though avant-garde in 1961, had grown dated in the eyes of many. Brutalism, so called after the French term for raw concrete (beton brut), was in some ways a reaction to the glass-box style that the early modernists pioneered. In Kallmann’s words, brutalism “in its physical concreteness and firmness of build, strives for a confirmation of identity and existence to counter the modern fear of nothingness.”

Though initially lauded by architects and critics, the building did provoke some negative reactions from the start. According to legend, when the design was unveiled to an audience of government officials, some gasped, and one called out, “What the hell is that?” Collins, however, remained enthusiastic, and in the last days of his administration, he demanded to go to work in his new office in the brutalist structure. Unfortunately, the infrastructure of the building was rather undeveloped—the elevators, clocks, and heating system didn’t work—and Collins contracted pneumonia as a result of the building’s flaws. City employees still complain about poor ventilation and dark interiors. In an interview with the Boston Globe three years ago, Kallmann responded to the criticisms leveled at his creation these past 30 years: “You know, City Hall is unpopular just now, but we can wait. At the time, it was shocking to some because it was at the edge of advanced architecture. But my partner, Michael McKinnell, and I wanted something that would last and not be just a fashion of the moment. The nature of public buildings is that they’re signature buildings and, therefore, should be of interest over time.” Next in our series on Boston City Hall: a closer look at Kallmann and McKinnell’s ideology. Why did they choose the forms they did? How did their design represent a progressive, optimistic, transparent government in a city confronted by urban problems?

Here’s a good reason to go to art school. “We’re...

Fri, 22 Oct 2010 16:00:37 -0400

Here’s a good reason to go to art school.

“We’re told [the creators of the video] are “studying film and animation at the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne, Germany and the Vancouver School’s Digital Design program, respectively.” via Stereogum

Architecture panel at the Boston Book Festival this Saturday

Thu, 14 Oct 2010 22:27:58 -0400

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

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

Wed, 13 Oct 2010 11:10:00 -0400

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.

"an unpretentious Giverny of the California interstate"

Sun, 03 Oct 2010 11:44:39 -0400

“an unpretentious Giverny of the California interstate”

- on Sacramento. from a New York Times article on Wayne Thiebaud

Design Research Building, Cambridge, MA

Mon, 23 Aug 2010 23:56:00 -0400

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.

[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?

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

Wed, 18 Aug 2010 10:15:04 -0400

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..."

Wed, 18 Aug 2010 07:55:58 -0400

“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