Photo: Bill Hughes

Adam Tihany, known for designing iconic restaurants and famous resorts from New York to Jerusalem and points in between, is the new art director for the prestigious Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, New York. Tihany is set to play a key role in the aesthetics of CIA’s expansion and renovation programs. I spoke to him about his latest projects, his advice to young designers in a challenging market, and his plans for the future.

Paul Makovsky: I know it’s early, but what are your initial thoughts as the new art director for prestigious The Culinary Institute of America?

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This year’s NeoCon World’s Trade Fair is less than two weeks away. If you’re traveling to Chicago for the event, be sure to pick up a copy of our annual Taste of the Town guide at the Merchandise Mart. Although, really, why wait until you arrive to make dining plans? You can read all our restaurant recommendations—conveniently classified by lunch, dinner, and drinks—in the online version of the guide, now available on our Live@NeoCon site.

If things go as planned, the Aircruise might just be the future’s slowest way to get around. For now, however, the 265-meter-tall airship isn’t a finished product; an announcement the other week billed it as a “visionary transportation concept.” Seymourpowell, the design firm working on the project, and Samsung C&T, the construction company helping to develop the idea, present the Aircruise as a luxury cruise, or a hotel in the sky. The decadent dirigible  would stay in the air using hydrogen and solar power. Since the physics of keeping such a structure afloat require a large volume with little weight, the concept necessitates vast spaces and few passengers: a recipe for luxury designed to “appeal to people looking for a more reflective journey.” Our bet is the design won’t get built anytime soon, but who knows—there’s always a chance it could get off the ground.

Related: Our 2007 profile of the French designer Jean-Marie Massaud included a look at his concept for a 700-foot-long airborne eco-hotel.

Update: The folks at Airships.net are denouncing the Aircruise concept for its proposed use of flammable hydrogen and its un-aerodynamic shape.

Robert, a new restaurant in the Museum of Arts and Design

When Sarabeth’s closes its Whitney outpost in the middle of this month, it will mark the end of the restaurant’s 19-year presence in the museum’s basement (it was the first private restaurant to operate within a New York City museum).

And when Robert, on the top floor of the Museum of Arts and Design, begins dinner service, also in the middle of this month, it will mark the full opening of the city’s latest museum restaurant (the café currently serves lunch and tea).  As Sarabeth’s closes shop—Danny Meyer, of Shake Shack fame, plans to open a new Whitney eatery in the fall and a pop-up café in the meantime—Robert will hope to duplicate the recipe (figuratively, of course) that kept the Whitney fixture in business since 1991.  The food is billed as “American fare,” but, for now, it’s the décor—custom tables and chairs by the architect Philip Michael Wolfson, lighting by Johanna Grawunder, furniture by Vladimir Kagan, and a video installation by the artist Jennifer Steinkamp—that takes top billing.

Previously: We took a quick look at the Guggenheim Museum’s new restaurant and admired a line of  fiberglass furniture by Vladimir Kagan. In 2008, Peter Hall argued that critics of the Museum of Arts and Design missed the real point of the building.

Last night was the press preview for The Wright, a sleek new restaurant shoehorned into a tiny space at the southwest corner of the Guggenheim Museum. For anyone who remembers its former manifestation—a maroon-walled café crowded with tables and framed photographs—the new interior will seem like a major departure, and an appealing one at that. Designed by the New York architect Andre Kikoski, it is pristine white with a few bold exceptions: the saturated-blue banquettes, a curving walnut wall above the bar, and a series of powder-coated aluminum planks mounted to the walls and ceiling. The last turns out to be a site-specific sculpture by the British artist Liam Gillick (who also happens to be Kikoski’s neighbor) titled The horizon produced by a factory once it had stopped producing views.

As for the cuisine, it will be what you might call Upper East Side comfort food: seared diver scallops, Maine lobster, slow-roasted suckling pig. (The chef is Rodolfo Contreras, a David Bouley protégé.) The Wright opens to the public on December 11. A few more snapshots follow, after the jump. Read more…

Four Seasons ashtrays—which, according to the critic Ada Louise Huxtable, were meant to be stolen. Photo: Paul Makovsky

The Four Seasons restaurant is always a fun place to go to for a special occasion. Last evening was especially so, when the National Trust for Historic Preservation presented Alex von Bidder and Julian Niccolini, managing partners of the restaurant, with the President’s Award for their longstanding stewardship and preservation of the restaurant’s interiors. It’s the first time that the President’s Award has been given in recognition of a modern interior—something the preservationists and developers need to focus on more these days. Read more…

Photo: courtesy Steelcase

When Jim Hackett, Steelcase’s CEO, and James Ludwig, the company’s VP of global design, invited us—panelists and moderator—to dine at Wright’s restored Meyer May house, I felt my spine tingle. On the evening before the September 10th symposium, which focused on what today’s designers can learn from the master, I was thinking of how uncomfortable sitting in those stiff chairs would be. But instead we were all pleasantly surprised and grew to understand that Wright knew exactly how to bring people together.

With Jim and James seated at either end of the table and functioning as family patriarchs, the setting turned us into a lively group, willing to express opinions, argue (collegially, if heatedly at times), exchange ideas, and come away feeling that each of us had something to add to the discussion. Though the food, prepared with local produce, was delicious and the service courteous, we felt that it was Wright’s design that made it all work. Read more…

Photos: Eric Laignel/courtesy Tihany Design

“Everybody remembers La Fonda del Sol, but nobody remembers eating there. Believe me, I’ve asked.” Over lunch at the latest iteration of the famous restaurant, opened by Patina Restaurant Group earlier this year, Adam D. Tihany’s bon mots nearly outshine the space he designed. But, he might argue, that’s the point. Read more…

Therese Virserius Design recently unveiled Xie-Xie, a new restaurant brand from chef Angelo Sosa. Xie-Xie (pronounced shay-shay), which means “thank you” in Mandarin, brings us affordable Asian street food fare in a high-end setting.

Some thoughts from Therese Virserius on her design concept after the jump. Read more…

Architecture buffs who missed the opportunity to spend a night in the Guggenheim last fall may soon get a second chance—well, sort of. The winning design for Abu Dhabi’s five-star Helix Hotel, by Leeser Architecture, includes a spiraling floor plate that looks like a cousin of Frank Lloyd Wright’s famous snail-shell structure. But, of course, the Helix—which is the centerpiece of a new waterfront development adjacent to Zaha Hadid’s dune-like Sheikh Zayed Bridge—boasts a legion of luxury amenities, standout among them a rooftop deck with glass-bottom swimming pool (so you can admire your fellow guests’ bikini bods from eight stories below). Leeser is also working with Atelier Ten on sustainable features like an interior-cooling waterfall and GROW cladding on the outside surface. If this all sounds a tad bit too ambitious for the current recessionary climate, fear not: even with neighboring Dubai’s economy in free fall, Abu Dhabi is forging ahead with several high-profile building projects, including its very own, for-real branch of the Guggenheim, by the loose-lipped Frank Gehry.

Check out additional images of the Helix Hotel after the jump. For more on Leeser Architecture, read Metropolis’s stories on the World Mammoth and Permafrost Museum and the 3LD Art & Technology Center. Read more…