“The [in]-closure project goes far beyond a plain “public space”…it is the place where urban micro-events happen…conveying a social and interdependent economy based on time – a new type of commodity money to chat, debate, help ideas to germinate, be involved in community service, help, learn, play, relax, stroll, improve…” (ABF narrative)

What is the nature of public space in the coming century? How does that space function socially, economically, ecologically? Those are questions raised by the URBAN INTERVENTION ideas competition at Seattle Center, which recently completed its first phase. Three finalists were selected by a six person jury, with an additional seven commendations from a field of 107 international submissions. The finalists and all submissions can be seen here.

2012 is the 50^th anniversary of Seattle World’s Fair, which created the iconic Space Needle and a 74-acre civic campus called Seattle Center. The Center – home to theaters, museums, a film festival, and multiple cultural festivals throughout the year – has been undergoing a revitalization, with an updated master plan and new tenant groups.  The city is also engaged in other significant public space development, notably a new waterfront master plan led by James Corner Field Operations.

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I first came across Dutch Small’s collection of mid-century modern furniture on Fab.com. When I learned how successful the e-retailer has gown in the past few years, I wanted know how furniture—the kind of product that needs to be experienced (or so I thought)—can enjoy the successes recorded by Fab.com. So I asked the brains and power behind Forma Revivo, about the milestones that have lead to his success, his thoughts about selling excellent modern design at retail (not long ago such furnishings were available only through showrooms that cater to the design trades), his grandfather, and Elvis. With his new gallery about to open in Houston in May, I felt it was time for Dutch to share the secrets of his success.

Susan S. Szenasy: Dutch, I read that your interest in mid-century modern furniture began when you worked as a conservator. What was the first piece you fell in love with and why?

Dutch Small: I was raised in a creative environment by skilled conservators and successful artists. My mom is an accomplished carpenter. My grandfather did masterful furniture conservation work for Elvis. My grandmother did beautiful trompe l’oeil and worked for decades to perfect her gilding skills. I didn’t realize the value of being reared in an environment with very high skill, standards, and unmatched artistic integrity until about four months after I started working in the business full time. We found a desk by James Mont on which the original, very intimidating silver leaf finish was destroyed. Fortunately we work with modern design where restoration, if done well, does not diminish the value of an important work. I launched into the restoration and meticulously recreated the finish, sent the piece to auction, and at $20k, outsold any previous Mont desk. I fell in love with the piece as I took two years of decoding and tirelessly recreating to get the finish right! Its results at auction were affirmation that the skills I brought to the table were sufficient to satisfy the most discriminating collectors at the most influential modern design auction house. Read more…

If the benches in Hastings Hall were sparsely populated last Thursday, it’s because the word “sustainability” has gone gently into that good night at Yale School of Architecture. The arduous task of its resuscitation that evening fell to Adrian Benepe. The New York City Parks and Recreation Department commissioner brought insight rarely heard in the hallowed halls of architectural education, as he acknowledged the social and economic roles of good park design and the struggles of designing in the public realm.

The blurry definition of “sustainability” tends to obfuscate its application in contemporary practice. Benepe chose a holistic approach, offering up the 1987 Brundtland Report’s definition of sustainable development as development that “meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” This view opens up possibilities for urban park design beyond the technical interventions mastered by LEED advocates. The commissioner argued for design that fundamentally betters the lives of city dwellers. Citing the way Central Park’s romantic landscape continues, even 155 years after its opening, to serve as a means for New Yorkers to escape the crowded city through immersion in nature, he argued for a park design that incorporates timelessness and responsiveness to primal human desires, beyond computations of carbon gains and losses.

Central Park

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As we celebrate Mies’s 126th birthday, (March 27, 1886) we think of his legacy. If you’re a New Yorker (I mean by this more of a state of mind than regional location, really), the Seagram Building (built between 1954 and 1958) comes to mind. I first knew about that building through photographs, as an architecture student in Brazil, and admired its daringly elegant sense of proportion and its graphical quality (since that was basically what one could grasp in those days of pre-CAD animations). As students of architecture, we also knew about the radical ideas the building on Park Avenue embodied. That inspired us, as well.

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From Susan B. Komen to Kony, public discourse is the art “Happening,” taking to the streets and Twitter to affect global change and re-invention. Fortified with OWS, riots, performances, street art and viral social media campaigns, our public policy as well as our public lives are shaped by this expanding discourse. Art for social exchange and change is vital to this discourse. With spring madness upon us, I continue my interest in how art can be shared by the community as part of the envisioning and evolution of the species. Too much to ask for?

Art that lights a sudden, crackling fire in the haze, skews one’s head so it hurts a bit and awakens and puzzles unexpectedly in the night. Yes?

It’s been 99 years since the fiery and radical 1913 debut of the Armory Show in New York, where modern masters such as Marcel Duchamp’s’ nude descended a staircase and blasted open Victorian attitudes and created dialogue. Honoring that legacy in name, New York’s Armory fine art trade show traditionally opens the spring season. Thinking ahead to the 100^th anniversary next year of that seminal show, I visited the fair, the satellite shows around it, and three noteworthy art events of the season considering them my Petri dish, my crystal ball to see just where the art world is expressing and integrating community…can an Art Fair still rankle jaded New Yorkers’ perspective? The answer is Yes.

Signs of what I like to call “art off the cave walls” were present. This goes beyond the hallowed old model “art” made solely by artists in studios, or even art manufacturing teams in warehouses overseen by commodity traders such as Koons or Hirsch’s and sold to be quietly tucked away in a collector’s home or museum storage for investment. Instead there is art by modern-day shamans, for the intended purpose of public ritual experience and transcendence. Today, millions of the general public are directly engaged with “art,” scrapbooking away on Pinterest, or sharing Angelina Jolie memes on Facebook, fed with a steady fast food image diet streaming from YouTube and flat screens. Clearly 15 minutes of fame via 2D image bombardment alone does not change the world, albeit engagement with “art” has become a new kind of populist tool.

That’s the beauty of temporal art, from 15-minute fame viral art memes online to environment friendly performance art, anyone, not just the “1%,” can have direct experience of “being there,” in the midst of history as an art-maker and documenter.  If one says there is a “there” there, there is. Art establishment stalwarts, Christies’ storage experts at their Armory booth space, spoke cheerfully on the “storage of” temporal art, wherein for valuing and the posterity, only the paperwork, the documentation, must be preserved.  However, the truth is that paper’s own temporality cannot trump the art, craft, and validity of online documentation, now sourced from multiple media generators themselves, aka the general public, through Twitter and cell phone cameras. This determines newer distinguishing value factors and the question of art “ownership” now begins to be redefined—a very different model of society. The future we are building is here and it’s coming.

So how did the art world itself bring this change on? Did they build it this spring, and did the people come?

The “There” at an Art Fair
Ken Johnson of The New York Times has called the Armory Show a “maze of art shops” and this year the fair, in order to further personally engage its 60,000 visitors, actually cited a focus on “urban restoration,” via both the commissioned artist for the whole show, urban architect, performance artist, and art-world golden boy of the moment, Theaster Gates, to a re-design of the show floor by architects, Jane Stageberg, AIA, LEED AP of Bade Stageberg Cox.

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Photo by Karl Schmeck

Midterm reviews for the BIG/Durst studio have come and gone, and now we’re reflecting on the criticism and issues raised during the day. Our studio project focused on “social infrastructure” (a term employed by Bjarke Ingels), as it relates to the design of a habitable bridge. The primary investigation outlined by the studio brief was to test how architects might be able to propose novel models of public/private partnership, such that a new transit bridge in New York could be funded in part by private development.

This challenge is compounded by the technical and structural considerations of bridge construction and maintenance, as well as the lifestyles and housing typologies that would be designed into the architecture. The project is a sort of Gordian Knot—it needs criticism and expertise from all manner of disciplines in order to untangle it. We were fortunate to have on our jury, in addition to our teachers architect Bjarke Ingels and developer Douglas Durst, Jerry van Eyck from !melk, Claire Weisz from WXY Studio, Paul Stoller from Atelier Ten, Craig Schwitter from Buro Happold, and Julia Watson from REDE, along with studio critics Thomas Christoffersen and Andrew Benner. Read more…

Photo by Roger Edwards

Photo by Matthew Pillsbury

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It hit me really hard about a year ago when I walked out of Changi Airport in Singapore: that particular combination of cloying orchids, dried fish, durian, drains and that peculiar acrid-yet-sweet smell of wet tarmac after the monsoon rain, all carried on a humid tropical breeze right up my nostrils to that most primal and limbic part of our brain: the olfactory system. The part of the body that is said to hold memory.

This memory was overwhelming. I was home.

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An overflow of students, faculty, and alumni crowded a lecture and workshop given recently at Parsons The New School for Design by interior designers George Yabu and Glenn Pushelberg of Yabu Pushelberg. For well over an hour, they delighted us with images and anecdotes on their best work from around the world, including the interiors of Lane Crawford in Beijing, Avenue Road in Toronto, and their private residences in New York and Canada.

They also presented their strategy of developing design concepts through a character-driven narrative. That approach was to be the basis of a weekend workshop for me and 19 other architecture, interior design, lighting design, and product design students at the School of Constructed Environments.  Our challenge was to design the lobby of The Smyth, a boutique hotel in Tribeca, which was a recent project of Yabu Pushelberg’s. By examining the identity of the neighborhood and its residents, as well as the ideal traveler who would prefer to stay there, we created a persona and brought him to life via images that portrayed his lifestyle and everyday habits, even his quirks.  The more detailed the story, the better, since these were the clues that would really bring our design to life. Then we were divided into teams to ensure a cross-pollination of design disciplines.

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Since we’re on the topic of design technology, we may as well start talking about the holidays. In the last 5 years or so online videos have become de rigeur for company holiday cards. Like the switch from paper towels to air blowers in the washroom, it’s a move that undoubtedly makes a lot of sense from a sustainability standpoint, but still leaves residual droplets of concern, as we attempt to make small talk over the roar of technological innovation, as to whether we are actually living in a better world.

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