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…

In the age of ecology and sustainability, landscape architecture, like other design professions, is in the process of finding new areas of exploration, new types of work, and a more diverse group of clients that require renewed research and learning. Gary Hilderbrand’s erudite and accessible essay, in a new book on his firm, is an inspiring guide through a modernist’s commitment to rationality and abstraction while it shows a deep understanding of and respect for the immense variety and unpredictability of the profession’s pre-eminent material, Nature. Combining skill with hope, the firm has created and is in the process of creating, some of our most memorable, yet sometimes invisible landscapes, thus the name of the book, Visible/Invisible: Landscape Works of Reed Hilderbrand, newly published by Metropolis Books. In addition to Gary’s enlightened view of his profession, we hear from such notable figures as Peter Walker and the photographer, Millicent Harvey, among others. But it’s Hilderbrand’s own words that make us want to see, examine, marvel at, and appreciate what his firm is doing. “The landscape is bigger than we are,” he writes. “We alter its substance and its processes, and it grows back at us with force. We can’t see exactly how, but we know it will. We come to embrace a certain image. Is it right?” —SSS

In the early morning light of a photograph taken by Alan Ward in the summer of 2010, a canopy of cedar elms hovers over a pavilion, a swimming pool, and gently graded lawn terraces. The image was made on the bank of Upper Bachman Creek in Dallas, Texas, on a 6-acre property where Philip Johnson designed a house in 1964 for Henry S. and Patricia Beck. When Doug Reed and I first visited this site in 2003, the spatial power of these trees was barely visible. Fully engulfed in a tangle of two species of Ligustrum—one shrublike, growing up to 12 feet in height, the other with 3-inch trunks reaching nearly 20 feet—the land was virtually impenetrable. For perhaps two decades, an aging Mrs. Beck had neglected portions of her property east of the creek and benignly allowed nature to run its course. More than a hundred volunteer cedar elms and a handful of other trees, including several Texas live oaks and a single giant cottonwood, had formed a canopy that merged with comparably overgrown woodlands on either side of the parcel. We saw a degraded, illegible landscape.

Mrs. Beck sold the property in 2002 to a young Dallas family of four, and the new owners committed to a massive project to rescue and reinhabit Johnson’s house and to recover health and functionality for the landscape. Over a seven-year period, we transformed this patch of emergent forest through a set of operations and practices whose evidence is sometimes visible but often obscured. Recapturing a space for family life and for the display of sculpture necessitated significant disturbance and successive rehabilitation efforts: removing dozens of the poorest trees and preserving the most viable; opening up the canopy to improve light and air; eliminating invasive plant species; correcting drainage and soil structure; reinforcing and replanting the stream bank; and establishing several kinds of grassland and prairie and groundcover crops. Read more…

Long Island: The Sunrise Homeland, sponsored by the Long Island Assocation for the 1939 World’s Fair

Long Island at mid-twentieth-century, you might have heard, was a place of explosive growth. Most of this was not very interesting. Sprawl. Tract housing. Billy Joel. They came with the island’s rapid suburban development. For a brighter look at the considerable architectural benefits of the period, there’s Long Island Modernism 1930-1980 by Caroline Rob Zaleski.

The book is an erudite tour from Great Neck to Montauk through a vibrant half-century of architectural experiment, incorporating stylistic eddies from the late Prairie Style to brutalism to high modernism and hitting such curiosities as a canvas-walled home and the only Mies van der Rohe-renovated barn along the way. Yes, that’s right. The Northern State Parkway, the Southern State Parkway, and Long Island Expressway, plus all additional tendrils of Robert Moses’ road-building offered countless new prospects for residential construction in the New York market. Affluent clients rapidly seized upon the opportunity, often lured by rising waves of architectural fashion and promise.

Leonhardt house, photo courtesy of Ezra Stoller (c) Esto

Long Island Modernism is a story, in large part, of New York City wealth grafting Bauhaus and Tailesin ideas onto picturesque spots in an empty countryside, and Zaleski does an excellent job of explaining both the cultural and design background in detail. Wright’s Rebuhn house appears, as do three homes by Antonin Raymond, Wright’s collaborator on the Japanese Imperial Hotel. The volume features four homes by Marcel Breuer, six by Breuer’s sometime director of design, William Landsberg, one by his partner Hamilton Smith, and one by Jane Yu, an interior designer in the firm. Richard Neutra, early Viennese émigré and fallen Wright disciple, designed two homes. Herman Herrey, also of the German diaspora, designed two. Round the list out with works by Sert, Durrell Stone, Philip Johnson, Richard Meier, and a handful of others from an amply-interconnected modernist pantheon and suddenly you have an island worth close attention.

Rebuhn House, courtesy of the Ronald Rebhuhn Collection

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When picturing Phillip Johnson’s Glass House, what comes to mind is the skeletal and translucent structure sitting among 47-acres of lush Connecticut landscape. The subtle color of the modernist building is so seamlessly integrated into nature that it recedes to the background and often goes unnoticed. This design decision was the work of master architectural colorists, Donald Kaufman and Taffy Dahl, who rendered the site-specific color palettes for Johnson’s architecture when it was built in 1949.

Hailing from a background in creating ceramics and paintings, Kaufman and Dahl work as a team, providing logical coloring as “frosting on the cake” to architectural masterpieces. In this film released by The National Trust for Historic Preservation, the two colorists are invited to share their experience of the Glass House, on-site with the public:

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The Glass House’s forgotten older brother re-enters the architecture world thanks to a real estate advertisement. The Booth House, Phillip Johnson’s first commissioned home, was recently put on the market by Sirkka Damora, an architect and editor who lived there for fifty five years with her husband Robert, a renowned architectural photographer. So thank you William Raveis Real Estate for reminding the world of its impact. Read more…

From left: Andy Warhol, David Whitney, Philip Johnson, Dr. John Dalton, and Robert A. M. Stern in the Glass House in 1964. Photo: David McCabe

Writing 24 years ago in Architectural Digest, Vincent Scully called Philip Johnson’s Glass House “the most sustained cultural salon that the US had ever seen.” Within the glass walls of that modernist marvel, people like Andy Warhol, Frank Stella, and Robert A. M. Stern battled wits over the endless martinis supplied by Johnson and his partner, David Whitney. Now, thanks to the National Trust for Historic Preservation and the School of Visual Arts (SVA), that vibrant discussion continues at glasshouseconversations.org.

After the architect’s death in 2005, the National Trust realized that it would be meaningless to preserve the building without attempting to preserve the culture of inquiry and debate that animated it for so many years. In 2008 and 2009, they held two events under the new Glass House Conversations program, inviting cultural, business, and educational leaders to sit around and have a chat, just like the old days. (Metropolis’s editor-in-chief, Susan Szenasy, co-moderated the conversation in 2008; watch the video here.) This year, the Philip Johnson Glass House teamed up with SVA’s graduate programs in interaction design and design criticism to update that format for the age of Web 2.0 and social networking. Read more…

This is the second of two reports from a recent daylong retreat at Philip Johnson’s iconic residence. Click here to read part 1.

Photos: Belinda Lanks

A small cadre of design professionals came together last Wednesday at Philip Johnson’s Glass House to discuss the thornier issues of Modern preservation. The site was a perfect setting for such a conversation: Johnson guaranteed the survival of his 47-acre compound in New Canaan, Connecticut, by transferring it to the National Trust for Historic Preservation, which opened the grounds to the public in 2007. Among the compelling questions raised were: What steps should be taken to ensure the survival of important postwar structures, and how can architects find new lessons in those buildings while respectfully moving beyond them? Read more…

This is the first of two reports from a recent daylong retreat at Philip Johnson’s iconic residence. Click here to read part 2.

The Brick House (left) sits across the lawn from the Glass House. Photo: Timothy Hursley

Last week I attended the Architects Retreat at Philip Johnson’s Glass House. Before the full-day program began, we took a now familiar tour of the spectacular property in New Canaan, Connecticut. When we got to the Brick House, the smaller companion to the Glass House across the lawn, we were warned not to go in. Mold has taken over this cozy 1949 structure to the point where everything therein is now covered with it, including the classic Gaetano Pesce chairs and the books on the shelves. Now empty, waiting for remediation and restoration, the Brick House is about to become a test case for the National Trust’s new approach to preserving Modernist buildings in the age of sustainable design. Read more…

Architects feeling the pinch from the ongoing recession (i.e. pretty much everyone in the field) may find some encouragement in The Philip Johnson Tapes, a new book based on ten interviews Robert A. M. Stern conducted with the eminent architect in 1985. Though Johnson is remembered as a veritable force of nature—a prolific builder, an influential patron, and an unflagging party host—Stern’s interviews also touch on the numerous personal and career setbacks he overcame along the way. One particularly bad stretch started in 1942, when the 35-year-old Harvard graduate student was drafted into the Army. There, the maladroit Private Johnson—known among his fellow recruits as “Granddad” or “Pop”—failed even at digging ditches.

I remember being told by a corporal who was digging ditches to get out of the ditch. I said, “Why? I’m supposed to be digging ditches. That’s what you told me to do.” He said, “You’re confusing everybody. You can’t dig a ditch. You’re making everybody else look like they can’t dig ditches. So you get out and sit over there until we get through digging this ditch.” That’s how poorly coordinated I was. That was the most humiliating moment in my life, I think. Those dumb asses. I was working five times as hard as they were, but probably just digging the earth and putting it back in the same place. I still don’t know what I was doing wrong. It was just unbelievable. One remembers things like that.