Click the play button to watch Metropolis’s editor in chief, Susan S. Szenasy, discuss this year’s Smart Environments Awards.

The annual IIDA/Metropolis Smart Environments Awards recognize excellence in interiors that are in tune with 21st-century needs and desires—meaning that they are beautiful, sustainable, and accessible. Click here to read about this year’s winning projects. For monthly coverage of the best in sustainable design, subscribe to Metropolis today.

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.

In her monthly “Letter from Baltimore,” Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson writes about architecture, culture, and urbanism in a city more often associated with violent crime than with good design. Click here to read her previous posts. For more by Dickinson, visit her blog, Urban Palimpsest.

In 2004, the graphic designer Kat Feuerstein gathered a group of friends, rented a U-Haul, and drove from Baltimore to an outlying county to see a man about a letterpress. In this case, it was a platen jobbing press built at the turn of the last century by Chandler and Price, an Ohio-based manufacturer that specialized in movable-type printing. Founded in the 1880s, the company set the standard for letterpress machines, but went out of business in the 1960s when offset printing eclipsed the market.

The man selling the antique had once owned a printing business and he couldn’t understand why a young woman would be willing to pay $350 for a piece of heavy machinery that had been gathering rust. “He told me, ‘I don’t think there’s really a market for this,’” Feuerstein recalls today. “And he kept reminding me that it wasn’t a toy.”

Five years and five antique presses later, Feuerstein’s business, Gilah Press + Design, is booming with a line of letterpress greeting cards retailed through clients like Anthropologie and Kate’s Paperie, and a custom-design business that thrives on the market’s desire for tactile, deep-impression letterpress. Gilah also runs letterpress print jobs for other area designers. Read more…

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Learning from Hangzhou
By Mathieu Borysevicz
Preface by Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown
Timezone 8, 330 pp., $45

China is urbanizing at an astounding rate. Those of us who don’t live there might know this from statistics (like: the country consumes more than half the world’s concrete.) Borysevicz, an artist, writer, and filmmaker who splits his time between Shanghai and New York, knows from observation. He spent five years in the Chinese city Hangzhou, and here he collects thousands of color photographs from that tenure. Yet, for someone who communicates almost exclusively through pictures, Borysevicz seems relatively unconcerned with aesthetics—at least in the sense that many of his photos aren’t pretty or refined and, as presented in this book, are often cropped and jammed awkwardly on the page. But that may be the point. Hangzhou is one of many fast-developing cities in the Yangtze River Delta corridor; and as it accommodates an average of over 100,000 new residents per year, it’s facing the messy reality of ad-hoc urban growth. By refraining from aestheticizing that growth, and focusing instead on Hangzhou’s many recurring visual cues—highway billboards, graffiti, construction scaffolding—Borysevicz captures the essential, if sometimes unpleasant, markers of one burgeoning Chinese metropolis.
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From Autos to Architecture: Fordism and Architectural Aesthetics in the Twentieth Century
By David Gartman
Princeton Architectural Press, 400 pp., $60

Gartman, an automobile enthusiast and a sociology professor at the University of South Alabama, marries those two disparate interests in From Autos to Architecture. The book  asks why the International Style developed where it did, in a post-war Europe whose manufacturing technology lagged far behind that of America and whose emphasis on traditional craft contrasted sharply with an American reverence of mass production. Not surprisingly, the key object in this history—and the product that most aptly symbolizes modernism and American culture in the middle of the last century—is the car. Gartman uses the aesthetics of “Fordism” and the evolving cultural reaction to that movement to explain why architects first embraced, and eventually rejected, automobile production as a philosophical and aesthetic exemplar.
Read more…

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…

Photos: Mark la Rosa/courtesy Pratt Institute

It’s not every day that recent design-school graduates get to see their work showcased in finished residences, but Pratt students will get that chance soon, thanks to a collaboration between the university and the New York-based developer Hudson Companies. More than 90 students, faculty, and alumni from the institute will display their furniture, textiles, lighting, and an assortment of other home furnishings in two model apartments designed by Rogers Marvel Architects at Third + Bond—a 44 unit, townhouse-style development in Carroll Gardens that mixes luxury condominium housing with environmental design (the entire project’s on track to receive LEED Gold and Energy Star certifications).  Inside the apartments, prospective buyers will find everything from teapots to first aid kits, all Pratt-made, in an arrangement curated by Anthony Caradonna, an alum and professor at the School of Architecture.  It’s student meets teacher, academic meets commercial, on display at 115 Third Street beginning next week.

Check out more photos of the Third + Bond interiors after the jump. Read more…

In her monthly “Letter from Baltimore,” Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson writes about architecture, culture, and urbanism in a city more often associated with violent crime than with good design. Click here to read her previous posts. For more by Dickinson, visit her blog, Urban Palimpsest.

Elevation drawings of a former Baltimore mill that now houses some 90 businesses, including the author’s small corner office

Last year, I spent several months working in New York and commuting back to Baltimore on the weekends. One night I sat in the audience of an event in Manhattan where the Baltimore-based firm Post Typography explained the benefit of inexpensive office rent. Freed from high overhead, the designers are able to take more personal and creative risks in their work.

In recent years, I’ve noticed more designers setting up shop in Baltimore in a variety of building types, from the archetypal Baltimore row house to the massive mills erected in the boom years of the Industrial Revolution. 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…

Meyer May photos: courtesy Steelcase

Last week I was fortunate to be in the audience at the Meyer May house anniversary symposium, a wide-ranging discussion of Frank Lloyd Wright’s ideas and principles as embodied in the Grand Rapids, Michigan, house he built for the clothier Meyer May in 1909. In 1987, the local furniture behemoth Steelcase finished a meticulous two-year restoration of the house—which, among other problems, had a seriously leaky roof—and opened it up for public tours. It’s now considered perhaps the most complete distillation of Wright’s vision, and this year it turned 100 years old.

But the symposium didn’t dwell on the past. Read more…

Every year since 2002, the Cintas Corporation has selected the nation’s most prestigious privies and solicited Internet votes to decide the winners of the America’s Best Restroom Award. Top prize this year goes to a piece of over-the-top lavatory opulence in Branson, Missouri: the Shoji Tabuchi Theatre, whose ladies’ room (above) includes stained-glass windows, cut orchids, granite-and-onyx sinks, chandeliers, and a “ceiling reproduced from the 1890’s Empire Period.” Yow.

The other four finalists are not quite as lavish: Read more…