Reference Page: November 2004

Tabletop Skyline
Morphescape is available from Gaia & Gino, a subsidiary of Decorum Inc. They can be reached in Istanbul by phone at 90-212-234-4472 or by fax at 90-212-230-5291. As this issue goes to press, the Web site, www.gaiaandgino.com, is not serviceable but we have been assured that it will be up and running by October. To read some of Karim Rashid’s provocative assertions, including “I hate history,” “Poetry is over,” and “I don’t like nature,” go to www.designboom.com/eng/interview/rashid.html.

Buying the Bridge
Calatrava Bridges (Birkhauser, 2004), the book that inspired John Mancasola to invite Santiago Calatrava to Redding, California, was republished this year in a revised and expanded edition.

Kitchen Confidential
You can visit Julia Child’s kitchen at the Bon Appétit! Julia Child’s Kitchen exhibition at the Smithsonian Museum of American History, or take an online tour at americanhistory.si.edu/juliachild.

The People’s Court
For background information about the prison complex where South Africa’s new Constitutional Court is now located, click “Visit Us” on the Web site of the Constitution Hill project: www.constitutionhill.org.za.

Mass Consumption
For details about the exhibitions and talks at the 2004 St. Etienne International Design Biennial—which has a particularly strong non–Western European presence—go to this site: www.institutdesign.com/raff/gbiennale2004.html.

America
Town Haul is due to premiere on TLC in early 2005. A press release for the show can be viewed at http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/040722/cth056_1.html. Check out www.realitytvworld.com for all manner of news and information pertaining to reality TV, and to witness the level of obsession that the genre inspires. The Jeffersonville Chamber of Commerce website is www.jeffersonvillechamber.org.

Portfolio
For more on Seripop, check out www.seripop.com. Their posters are available in New York from Psychedelic Solutions (33 West 8th St, 2nd floor) and Leadbased (220 8th St, Brooklyn).

Prairie Poetry
To learn more about Garofalo Architects, check out www.garofalo.a-node.net. Read about their temporary conceptual project for the Museum of Contemporary Art in Between the Museum and the City (University of Illinois Press, 2004). If you find yourself in Queens, you can visit the New York Presbyterian Church, located at 43-23 37th Ave, Long Island City. This ambitious collaboration between Garofalo Architects, Greg Lynn FORM, and Michael Mcinturf Architects incorporates the structure of a former laundry factory into a facility that hosts services for 2500 people. Consulting ecologist Jennifer Baker can be found at Prairie Nursery, www.prairienursery.com (800) 476-9453. The Matrix Engineering Corporation’s Web site is www.matrixchicago.com. Contact J.C. Pendergast, Inc. by calling (888) 486-4348 or through their site www.jcpendergast.com.

Design ‘04
A huge array of historic and contemporary political bumper stickers, buttons, and other memorabilia can be viewed at http://ronwade.freeservers.com/. Everything is for sale, and with its strip-mall aesthetic (music, flashing links, Photoshop atrocities, etc.) the site might easily be mistaken for satire. For more on this shadowy enterprise visit the American Political Items Collectors website: www.apic.us. An interesting treatment of the intersection between politics and graphic design is Clean New World: Culture, Politics and Graphic Design, by Maud Lavin (MIT Press 2001). To learn more about the power of fonts, check out Typology: Type Design from the Victorian Era to the Digital Age by Steven Heller and Louise Fili (Chronicle Books, 1999).

Jun-ichi Arai: The Futurist of Fabric
If you missed the Museum of Modern Art’s Structure and Surface: Contemporary Japanese Textiles exhibit in 1998, this site is worth checking out: www.moma.org/exhibitions/1998/textiles/home.html. Gallery Gen has more than a dozen close-ups of Jun-ichi Arai’s materials on its site at www.gallerygen.com/araie.html.

Office Space
Cesar Pelli and Associates has a 55-story office-and-luxury-condo building under construction in New York City at Lexington between 58th and 59th Streets. The firm has also designed a tower for Bilbao’s regional government, a new central library for Minneapolis, and a performing arts center in Dayton—to name just a few of its current projects.

Defining Speed
Call the Warner Brothers Staff Shop at (818) 954-2269 to find out about getting a project made out of vacuformed plastic. For more information about Milgo/Bufkin’s metal-bending process, go to www.milgo-bufkin.com/algorhythms/index.html.

Modular Option
To learn more about Ahrend and the A500 desk system, go to www.ahrend.com. The North American distribution and service partner for Ahrend is Allsteel, www.allsteeloffice.com.

MoMA’s Master of Pure Line
The Museum of Modern Art will reopen on November 20. The exhibition Nine Museums by Yoshio Taniguchi will run until January 31, 2005, on the third floor of the renovated building. You can read the architect’s statement on the MoMA project at www.moma.org/expansion/charette/architects/taniguchi/index.html. In Japan, the easiest Taniguchi building to visit is the Gallery of Horyuji Treasures, part of the Ueno Park district of northern Tokyo. The Toyokan, by Yoshio’s father, Yoshiro Taniguchi, is just a few hundred yards away (as is a badly maintained museum by Le Corbusier). To see another side of Yoshiro, visit the lobby of the Okura Hotel, with its strange mix of Japanese teahouse, Frank Lloyd Wright, and 1950s Connecticut rec-room architecture. Outside Tokyo, the easiest Yoshio Taniguchi museum to see is the Marugame Genichiro-Inokuma Museum of Contemporary Art—across the street from the train station in Marugame. The Toyota Municipal Museum of Art is reachable by taxi from the station in Toyota City. The incinerator plant—the so-called Museum of Garbage—is a short taxi or bus ride from the center of Hiroshima. It is open to the public daily. The Architecture of Yoshio Taniguchi (Harry N. Abrams, 1999) contains photos and descriptions of most of Taniguchi’s work, but neither MoMA nor the Hiroshima plant was finished in time to be included.