On one of those luminous days, with mounds of snow melting in recently blizzard-ravaged Connecticut, I went to visit with Niels Diffrient in his studio. He asked me to try out a working model of a lounge chair, his current project. Not your father’s lounge chair, this one is designed to accommodate the analog and digital media we use every day. As I stretched out and felt the comfort and support of the chair, I recalled that Niels had designed a similar chaise at the beginning of the digital revolution when we predicted that work would change dramatically, but had no idea what that change would look and feel like.

It was 1987 and I was working on a Metropolis article, “Chaises Longues,” writing, “For most people, working and relaxing suggest different body positions but the two can be reconciled by the long chair.” As one of our illustrations we showed Niels sitting, feet up with his bulky desktop computer raised to the ergonomically correct height and placed on the swiveling tablet attached to his then new Jefferson chair.

Niels Diffrient is a tinkerer, a fixer, an ever-restless experimenter, and an industrial designer who is not afraid to go back to his old ideas and make them better, more appropriate, more useful. His approach is aided and abetted by his constant search for new information and ideas, gleaned from the great big world of human knowledge we all have access to, but few bother to dive into as Niels does. He is truly a practicing generalist.

So when his new book, Confessions of a Generalist, a self-published and self-marketed biography designed by Brian Sisco, appeared on my desk, I was eager to dip into the details of a life that I knew only through anecdotes. To give you a shorthand idea of Niels’s thought pattern, I decided to excerpt a portion of the book, a section entitled “The Foundation of Generalism.” It’s a start. —SSS

The first thing to understand is that design is not art. As Oscar Wilde is purported to have said “Art is absolutely useless.” In spite of some topical conceits such as “Functional Art” or “Art Design” and other such oxymorons, art remains without utility; design is integral with utility and usefulness. This means fulfilling the needs of people which includes aesthetic considerations, separating it from engineering design and other technical, specialized pursuits.

The next thing to understand is that design, as currently practiced, is an activity not a profession. Whether one is a fashion designer, graphic designer, product designer or interior designer, one is still pursuing an activity or applied practice. Design, as a word, is a verb, not a noun, and as such is not a suitable identifier for a practice that has not yet reached the standards of a profession. Read more…

Concrete, edited by William Hall with an essay by Leonard Karen, $49.95 US/CAN, Phaidon March 2013, www.phaidon.com

When I encounter a book dust jacket that’s textured to the touch I usually assume that it’s a willful distraction from the contents within; not so with Phaidon’s Concrete. Its striated cover perfectly evokes its complex subject.  Concrete, despite its historical roles from the Roman Pantheon to Fallingwater,  is a much-unloved material, rough to the touch and to the popular imagination.  Both the volume’s introduction and essay make immediate acknowledgement of its unpopularity. William Hall writes:

“Despite its range and ubiquity, many people associate concrete with rain-stained social housing, or banal industrial buildings,” writes William Hall. “Detractors of concrete cite such tired monoliths, and point out the failure of the material. Its economy and speed of production have inevitably led to its use on buildings of poor quality – frequently compounded by substandard design and inadequate maintenance. But concrete cannot be held responsible for all the failures of concrete buildings. For too long negative associations have dominated the public perception of concrete.”

A turn to the first photo in volume can do wonders to allay this perception, with a gently undulating concrete bridge complementing a rocky Austrian river view. Concrete need not be forbidding! And look, there’s the Guggenheim on the next page. Who doesn’t like that?

Concrete is something of a constructive wonder. This slurry of mineral and water is adaptable into almost any number of shapes and frames. The fact that most of these shapes haven’t been particularly imaginative is no fault of concrete itself; no more than wheat is to blame for Wonder Bread.

“Iron in combination with concrete, reinforced concrete, is the building material of the new will to form,” wrote Erich Mendelsohn in 1914. “Its structural strength capable of being loaded almost equally with stress and compression will give rise to a new, specific logic in the laws of statics, logic of form, of harmony, of implicitness.”

Subsequent failures are of imagination, not of material.

Niterói Contemporary Art Museum, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 1996, Oscar Niemeyer, page 123, photo courtesy of Leonardo Finotti
This 50 m (164 ft) wide flying saucer, perched on the edge of a cliff, was designed when Niemeyer was 89 years old. A wide winding slope connects visitors to the entrance 10 m (33 ft) above the ground.

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Philadelphia’s best kept secrets are hiding in plain sight. In the 19^th century, the city became embedded with quirky repositories of everything from dolls to dodos. City neighborhoods expanded, engulfing these manic collections as if flies in amber awaiting future discovery.

William Wagner (1796-1885) Philadelphia merchant, philanthropist, and amateur scientist.

Some ten years after I moved to Philadelphia I stumbled upon the wondrous Wagner Free Institute of Science, a luminous, old jewel set firmly within a tarnished urban cluster. Peeling, pale yellow with fading, dark green trim, this Victorian era relic sits just five residential blocks in from bustling N. Broad Street and the teeming campus of Temple University. Who knew?

The Wagner Free Institute of Science, Photo: Joseph G. Brin

Visiting the Wagner is a step back in time. You can see it and feel it. The rippled, sagging glass, the crusty, black wrought iron fencing. Tall, dark green front doors open to a wide staircase worn by the scuffle of countless natural science enthusiasts over almost one-hundred and fifty years. At the second floor landing, long rows of cherry wood and glass-encased exotica blossom before your eyes. The high space is awash in daylight from tall, single pane windows glistening with condensation in the cold. Even splashes of direct sun are welcomed and allowed to penetrate. The display cabinets themselves have that over-the-top, comprehensive look (over 100, 000 fossils, minerals, shells, insects and skeletons) of someone’s hand that seriously thought it could amass all the natural specimens of the entire world — under one barrel-vaulted, wood-trussed roof.

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On the one hand, New Urbanists say that cities should have minimal impact on their natural surroundings, while on the other hand world-class designs are defined by unconventional schemes that strive to minimize the use of non-renewables.  It seems, then, the twenty-first century building is a machine designed to rationalize its inputs while maintaining high function. But the agreement between the two groups ends there.

Should all architectural projects resort to minimalism out of ecological necessity? Or should those who create them strive for ever-inventive ways to trounce gravity? And if the interests of global commerce command the latter course, do these questions even matter?

Two current exhibits in New York showcase competing answers. The free, experimental public space that is the Guggenheim Lab on Manhattan’s Lower East Side (open through October 16th) personifies a democratic, minimalist approach.  Supertall! at the New York Skyscraper Museum (running through next January) posits that natural boundaries exist to be crushed.

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© Stiftung Preussischer Kulturbesitz / David Chipperfield Architects,
Photo: Jörg von Bruchhausen

On June 20, British architect Sir David Chipperfield took center stage at a ceremony in Barcelona to officially receive the much-coveted European Union Prize for Contemporary Architecture – Mies van der Rohe Award. Aside from having the longest name imaginable—henceforth shortened by this author to “Mies Prize”—it is also regarded as Europe’s most prestigious architecture honor.

Sir David has been having a good time of it these past two years. He was knighted in 2010 and was the recipient of this year’s RIBA Royal Gold Medal. He has been winning so much that people mistakenly assume he has also won a Pritzker Prize. To set the record straight, no, he has not. Not yet, anyway. There is always the possibility of a Chipperfield trifecta next year.

Why all the acclaim? What is so special about Sir David’s architecture? Read more…

Ok, so New Yorkers may not get the fuss, but we understand that special bond between a person and his car… and that Lamborghini driving down the street… or that blue VW Bug that reminds us of childhood. We may envision a future of vehicles fueled by renewable alternatives, and we  may have had a collective heart attack when the gas bill came this month, but there’s just something special about seeing a pristine, leather interior 1969 Yenko Chevrolet next to its other muscle car “bros”.

Those at the Museo Dell’Automobile di Torino get it. In April, they presented their new offering to the four-wheeled gods: a gorgeous building created by architect Cino Zucchi with the Recchi Engineering Srl company and the Proger SpA firm, and enhanced with displays by Francois Confino. “In the new Museum, we will tell the story of the motor car, its transformation from a means of transport to an object of worship, from its origins right up to the contemporary evolution of creative thought,”  states the website. 

To tell that story, they created what is, essentially, a very expensive garage for their 200 or so original cars, dating from the mid-19th century to present. The new housing is now a stunning mosaic structure with a curved façade reminiscent of the type of winding road you imagine most of the cars zipping down through the mountains. It’s reflective surface and frosted windows silhouetting vehicles such as the Ford Model T creates an inside-outside effect combining luxury with mechanical elements, the illusion of driving with the serenity of nature. 

The plan behind the design was to mesh the museum’s almost 90-year history with advancements in design, architecture and technology, while emphasizing the creative genius behind each car. Here visitors can see these mechanical masterpieces in a new light as ingenious forms, not just another gas-guzzler that took their parking spot.

Photo: Irina Lee.

Last week, the Metropolis art department headed up to MoMA to for a panel discussion between the museum’s design curator, Paola Antonelli and two renowned type designers, Matthew Carter (2010 MacArthur Grant recipient) and Jonathan Hoefler. The event was presented by the AIGA. MoMA recently acquired 23 typefaces for its collection, which are part of the new exhibition, Standard Deviation.

We went to the event that night wondering how a museum acquires a typeface. “We just buy it—or if they’re nice, they give it to us,” Antonelli simply said. But the process is a bit more complex than that. To choose what should go into the collection, Antonelli gathered experts from around the world, including graphic design critics, designers, and historians. Their choices range stylistically from Erik van Blokland and Just van Rossum’s FF Beowolf to Hoefler Frere-Jones’s Gotham (which we all know and love/loathe from Obama’s presidential campaign).

She reminded the inquisitive audience that it is not the museum’s objective to give the historical record of design; this is, after all, the Museum of Modern Art. Well, then, what is modern? Modern is everything that does not hide the process of its making. This definition comes from Kurt Varnedoe, the museum’s chief curator of painting and sculpture till 2003, and Antonelli keeps it in mind each time she curates a show.

Now I’m eager to check out the exhibition and learn the design process of the 23 chosen ones. This collection, said Antonelli, is only the beginning. She will be adding more typefaces and is open to suggestions. What would you add?

To read more about Paola Antonelli’s thoughts on Matthew Carter’s Verdana typeface, check out Essential Designs in April’s Metropolis.

It is going to be a while before Jean Nouvel’s celebrated National Museum of Qatar blossoms in the desert. But in the meanwhile, an architecturally modest museum with a far more ambitious mission is ready to open its doors for the New Year. The Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art aims to be a new pan-Arab center for culture and creativity, showcasing the work of modern artists from the region.

The Mathaf, pronounced MAT-haff and simply meaning “museum” in Arabic, is the third large museum project to be announced in Qatar in recent years. The expansive Museum of Islamic Art, which opened in 2008 in a building by I. M. Pei, is concerned with history – its collection dates from the 7th to the 19th centuries. Jean Nouvel’s desert rose will mostly be a Qatari exercise in national pride. The earliest pieces in the Mathaf’s collection, however, date to the 1840s. This is a museum primarily concerned with Arab modernity, considering through art some very complicated questions of identity, values and geography. Read more…

The architect Kevin Roche on the construction site of the Oakland Museum of California, circa 1969.

When we featured the Ford Foundation Building two years ago, I interviewed the landscape architect Peter Walker, who in talking about the importance of that Kevin Roche/John Dinkaloo-designed structure spent as much time extolling another building by those architects: the Oakland Museum of California. For our story on the restored building, I talked to Walker again. Peter has an encyclopedia grasp of landscape architecture history and the verbal ability to create a vivid picture of place. Here are his (slightly) edited memories of the building, as it was 41 years ago when it first opened.

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The architect Guy Zucker inserted an elegant, light-filled penthouse into this 1960s-era apartment building on Tel Aviv’s Rabin Square. Photo: courtesy Z-A Studio

It sounds like the beginning of a bad joke, but during a recent 12-hour flight from New York’s JFK airport to Tel Aviv, two Midwestern evangelical tourists on their way to the Holy Land could be overheard excitedly swapping notes on top upcoming destinations—Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Masada, the Dead Sea. “Why would you even want to go to Tel Aviv?” asked one, for whom the city was clearly an airport and little else. “I don’t know, the politics?” offered his friend. The unintentional punch line (last time we checked, Jerusalem was still the seat of government in Israel) was made all the more comic for its blithe indifference to the recent buzz over the city’s regeneration. Tel Aviv is the secular antithesis to everything that ancient Jerusalem represents; it’s young, cosmopolitan, progressive, energetic, and gritty. And in the past few years—as numerous magazines have been tripping over themselves to report—it’s seen a rising generation of artists, architects, filmmakers, restaurateurs, fashion designers, and other creative types.

I was headed there for the architecture. Tel Aviv is home to both the largest and densest concentration of Bauhaus-style buildings in the world, and to an impressive array of new projects by emerging and established architects. Specifically, I was in town for Houses from Within, a 48-hour event during which the city opens its doors and allows access to all kinds of buildings, large and small, public and private, historic and contemporary, obscure and celebrated (more than 160 sites in all). This urban steeplechase, now in its third year, is an ideal (if exhausting) means by which to assess the current moment in the city’s rebirth, and to see up close how the often contradictory municipal attitudes toward development, planning, and preservation play out in the built environment. Read more…