About halfway into the documentary Eames: The Architect and the Painter, the filmmakers Jason Cohn and Bill Jersey turn to Charles Eames’s way with words—or lack thereof. The legendary designer, it appears, was capable of being aimlessly verbose, repeating himself, taking off on tangents, and generally obscuring the matter at hand. “He had this ability,” the architect Kevin Roche says in the film, “of surrounding everything in a cloud of words.”

Using archival photographs and candid insights like Roche’s, the film takes on the prolific, multidisciplinary career of Charles and Ray Eames. With only occasional lapses into cheesiness—computer-animated cherry blossom petals flutter across the screen as the couple’s romance is described—it remakes the old argument that Charles (masculine, forceful, craftsman-thinker) and Ray (reticent, artistic, magpie-like hoarder) were some sort of yin and yang that produced the magic of the Eames office. There is a lot of discussion in the film about their incessant image-making: “Perhaps their greatest creation,” the celebrity narrator, James Franco, intones, “was the image of Charles and Ray Eames.”

But, I said to myself, what of their writing?

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Last week on ABC’s Nightline, Bill Weir, the host of the segment “This Could Be Big,” waved our October issue on national television. The segment was on QR codes, and our cover had a big one on it. Weir’s question was, “Will this get bigger, or will it end up on the dust heap of technology?”

Our technology issue was all about how digital tools are shaking up the design profession, from architects learning code to using software for participatory design. Putting a QR code on each of those stories was a no-brainer—they add a multimedia layer of information to the page.  But the QR code on our cover was really the masterstroke—it’s a portal to Metropolis’s first digital cover.  When our art director Dungjai Pungauthaikan called the designer Peter Alfano to create the content that lies beneath that huge pixelated box, she said “Peter, this is the cover you’ve been waiting for.” We will say no more, except that once you’ve watched Weir’s segment below, we suggest you get hold of our October issue, and use a smartphone on it. (Or click here)

The “boxes of squiggly lines” are not quite as easy as they are made out to be, as our art department discovered in implementing them. They had to take into account various video formats, incompatible web browsers, and different smartphones. But they stuck it out. Because until Weir’s fancy trick with the champagne bottle becomes generally available, the QR code is very far from the dust heap—it is still our easiest link from the printed word to the digital world.

Read our technology issue here, including the story about QR codes integrated into clothing.

In 1859, game hunter, sheep farmer, and horse trainer Thomas Austin released twenty-four wild rabbits on his estate in Western Australia. In ten years, those rabbits had become several million, denuding a landscape that had never before faced the scourge of such determined herbivores. The Royal Commission formed to deal with “The Rabbit Question” came up with a solution called the No.1 Rabbit Proof Fence—2,023 miles of barbed wire right across Australia, sealing off the rabbit-infested western coast, and requiring constant patrolling. Over a century later, seeing a small portion of that fence replicated this month in Lisbon for the exhibition Utilitas Interrupta: An Infrastructural Index of Unfulfilled Ambitions, makes the urgent efforts of an entire continent seem pitifully ludicrous.

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Nineteen Rooms for September 11, by Jill Magi; part of InSite: Art+Communication

In our September issue, we closely consider the task of memorializing both Ground Zero, and the events of September 11, 2001. Philip Nobel wonders if the official memorial at ground zero sufficiently addresses the memory of the event, while a photo essay documents the DIY and ad hoc monuments around the city—raw expressions of New York’s grief.  But for the tenth anniversary of the attacks, institutions and individuals are finding their own ways to explore and come to terms with the memory of the traumatic event:

Ten Years After 9/11: Remembrance and Reconciliation Through Poetry, by Poets House; part of InSite: Art+Communication

InSite: Art+Commemoration
Through October 11, New York
The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council invited artistic and community response to a decade of recovery and change in Lower Manhattan. You can find their listing of performances, poetry, and ideas on their web site, which also acts as a repository of some of the artistic works. Read more…

Strangely enough, television has long remained the last frontier for design. Books, magazines, web sites, radio podcasts, and even films abound, but if you wanted to watch popular design-themed programming on TV, you were probably stuck with home makeovers. But design author and trendspotter Lisa Roberts has changed all that with “My Design Life.”

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Le Corbusier designed a chaise longue, Mies van der Rohe had his Barcelona chair, and a bench by Frank Gehry was auctioned at an estimated $150,000 last year at Sotheby’s. Starchitects don’t just design buildings, and Zaha Hadid is no exception. An exhibition of her product designs, Zaha Hadid: Form in Motion, will open at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA) on September 17th.

Lacoste Shoes in leather and rubber, designed in 2008 by Zaha Hadid.

Hadid is no stranger to solo exhibitions—two very large ones were mounted at New York’s Guggenheim museum and London’s Design Museum in 2006 and 2007 respectively. And some of the objects on display at the PMA have been part of those exhibitions—Hadid’s Mesa Table, an organic branched table designed for Vitra in 2007 was displayed at the Design Museum show. But this will probably be the first exhibition to solely focus on her product design work, and as such is an unusual recognition for a major architect.

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For the past few months, Metropolis has had a ringside view of the first ever Core77 Design Awards—but so has everyone else! In an age that is so unfortunately obsessed with “vote for your favorite online,” the recently concluded awards program has pulled off a class act, making the act of judging design an open, inclusive experience that truly celebrates the profession.

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The Guangzhou Opera House, by Zaha Hadid, photo: Virgile Simon Bertrand

Among the recognitions and awards given by the Royal Institute of British Architects, the Stirling and Lubetkin prizes are the most prestigious. The Lubetkin prize, in honor of the Tecton Group founder Berthold Lubetkin, is given to the best international building outside the European Union. The Stirling prize scarcely needs introduction. Long considered Britain’s foremost architectural award, and given for a building “built or designed in Britain,” it bestows upon the winner not only £20,000, but also a nimbus of accomplishment.

RIBA released the shortlists of both prizes this morning, and they include many familiar favorites of the Institute, such as Zaha Hadid, who has made it into both lists. Here are the selected buildings:

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Portable Spot Cleaner, designed by Adrian Mankovecky, Academy of Fine Arts and Design, Bratislava, Slovakia

If the Electrolux Design Lab competition were given charge of the future of our home appliances, all our gadgets would be monochrome, have oversize back-lit interfaces, and be either rounded or flexible. Since its inception in 2003, the competition has been asking industrial design students to imagine the future of home appliances, offering 5,000 Euros and a six-month stint at an Electrolux design center to the winner.  Each year’s theme is different, but the finalists always have a remarkable family resemblance. And they always manage to work past the fact that domestic appliances are energy guzzlers by suggesting some as-yet-unproven battery technology – sugar crystal batteries are a hot favorite this year, perhaps because they were specified in last year’s winning entry.

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German Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing, March 22, 1944
Pavel Petrovich Sokolov-Skalya
Multicolor brush stencil on newsprint (pieced), laid down on tan Korean lining paper,
1872 x 845 mm (click on images to enlarge).

While here in the United States, the Bureau of Graphics at the Office of War Information was cranking out World War II posters by the hundreds of thousands, its Soviet counterpart took a far more artisanal approach. The exhibition Windows on the War: Soviet TASS Posters at Home and Abroad, 1941-1945, on view at the Art Institute of Chicago from July 31, will present 157 posters created by the Telegraph Agency of the Soviet Union (TASS) during World War II. All of these posters are between five and ten feet tall, and each of them was painstakingly painted by hand!

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