Reference Page: November 2006

Greener Education
A visit to the Central Park Conservancy’s Web site, www.centralparknyc.org, illustrates why the group is such an in-demand park mentor. The site features a variety of online tours; click on “Virtual Park” on the front page to see them. To recover from an endlessly ringing phone, we decided to take a jaunt through virtual green fields on the Kids Day Out tour. We giggled sweetly upon encountering the Alice in Wonderland sculpture, and skipped around (at least in our minds) at the Billy Johnson Playground. Each stop of the tour comes complete with a photo and historical description—what a figurative breath of fresh air! The Virtual Park section also offers free e-cards with scenic shots of the park (scroll down to the bottom of the page) for a variety of occasions, including winter, if you care to celebrate that.

Design and the State
Oh, the fragile rights of Romanian designers, soon to be Romanian artists formerly known as designers. Kit Paul and Ovidiu Hrin, the main players behind the opposition to the SDPR law limiting the use of the designation designer, have a petition at www.petitiononline.com/sdprabuz; we’ve been told that signatures are always welcome. You can read up-to-date information on the law and the characters involved at Kit’s blog, aptly named Kitblog.com. For clarity’s sake, begin your reading at his first post (go to “Design” in the categories sidebar, scroll down to “A communist design law in the making,” and click on “Read more”), which he says ignited debate on the issue. Unfortunately it’s difficult to get much information online in support of the SDPR’s position unless you read Romanian. But Kit has compiled a list of press coverage that should provide a more thorough understanding of the issues, and he includes more than a few articles in English: click “Browse archives by date,” then choose “2006” and “July 5” on the calendar.

Sit, Rotate, Repeat
In case you’re still skeptical about this whole “Pilates while you work” business, please visit the Sguig homepage, www.sguig.com, one of the more hilarious product sites in recent memory. Because the chair is specially designed to account for sitting differences between the sexes (boys lean, girls perch), you’re offered the option of clicking on either a man or a woman and watching him or her “sguig” (yes, it’s purportedly a verb as well as a proper noun). Who knew that finding your “pelvic balance point” could be so obscene? But if “shoulder ergonomics” aren’t so much your thing, there are plenty of other innovative products by Vienna-based trio EOOS at the firm’s ultra minimalist Web site, www.eoos.com, from sleek Modernist furniture to experimental design shorts such as “Laboratory” (click on “Basic research”), which looks at how “symbolic treatment transforms everyday table objects into manifestations of rituals.” You’ll never look at a table setting the same way again. The research section also offers a behind-the-scenes view of the EOOS creative process, displaying design sketches, charts, and informative text on the company’s guiding principles. As evidenced in the Sguig, EOOS believes that “flexibility and transformation are important elements in achieving comfort.” Plus you’ll be the envy of the cube farm.

Extending the Legacy
It’s said that if you live in a glass house, you shouldn’t throw stones. But the more urgent problem in terminally Waspy New Canaan, Connecticut, is where to store your books, hang your art, entertain your guests, and get dressed in private. Perhaps that’s why Philip Johnson had ten additional structures on his estate, which opens to the public in April. Visit www.philipjohnsonglasshouse.org and submit your e-mail address to receive information on ticketing. If spring seems decades away, you can always settle for the satellite view at www.google.com/maps. Type in the Glass House address—842 Ponus Ridge, New Canaan, CT—click on “Satellite,” and look for the flashy red sliver: that’s Da Monsta. Johnson enthusiasts can take comfort in the fact that the new executive director of the estate, Christy MacLear, is planning a study program in addition to regular tours. A small group of 12 to 20 people, accompanied by professors, will have exclusive access to the site for a week, which we imagine as a kind of summer camp for architecture geeks. Call the Glass House office at (203) 594-9884 for more information next spring. To brush up on your Johnson hagiology, get Hilary Lewis’s The Architecture of Philip Johnson (Bulfinch, 2002) and Philip Johnson: The Architect in His Own Words (Rizzoli, 1994) via the author’s site, www.hilarylewis.com; or for the definitive critical biography, try Franz Schulze’s Philip Johnson: Life and Work (University of Chicago Press, 1996). Johnson also makes a number of appearances in The Gay Metropolis: 1940–1996 (Houghton Mifflin, 1997), Charles Kaiser’s history of gay life in New York. Once you’ve read all that, we recommend letting the time-reversing power of the Internet take you back to 1967, when the Velvet Underground performed at the Glass House as part of a benefit for famed choreographer Merce Cunningham (whose troupe MacLear arranged to perform at the fund-raiser this summer). You can hear a clip from the Velvets’ live performance of “Venus in Furs” at members.aol.com/olandem2/perf67.html.

Staging a Meal
For information about visiting Madeleine’s Food Theater, the company has a Danish-only Web site, www.madeleines.dk, where you can order tickets—7th Sense opens this month—and, theoretically, find out when productions will be coming to a kitchen near you. There are also plenty of gastronomic arts happening in North America. The Food Museum, www.foodmuseum.com, based in Albuquerque, New Mexico, celebrates the history of food and its attendant human interactions through explorations of where our food comes from, how it has evolved, its impact on the world, and its possible future. The site features stills from Spanish director Luis Buñuel’s food-themed films, which will be shown this month in the Film & Food Festival, in southern Mexico: www.foodmuseum.com/foodfilmfestivals.html. Some of the more memorable images are from Buñuel’s 1974 Phantom of Liberty, which “reverses the private and public functions of eating and evacuating.” Appropriately, guests sit around a dining table on toilets and leave the room to eat in private.

A Forbidden Garden Restored
What’s so forbidden about the For-bidden City? For one thing, the Chinese government has decided that Jianfugong Garden—one of the most stunning sites within the district, and one that recently cost the China Heritage Foundation a pretty yuan to rebuild—will only be open to visiting dignitaries and other special guests. If you fall under “riffraff” (i.e. tourists) and want a sneak peek at the serenely named Pavilion of Prolonged Spring, or even the Tower of Auspicious Clouds, then be sure to see the spread on pages 110–111. For a detailed account of the imperial treasures collected by the Qing Dynasty—palace furnishings, ceremonial clothing, arms, and armor—pick up Splendors of China’s Forbidden City: The Glorious Reign of Emperor Qianlong, by Chuimei Ho (Merrell Holberton, 2004). A CliffsNotes version is available from Chicago’s Field Museum, where Ho curated a 2004 exhibition of Forbidden City art: www.fieldmuseum.org/forbiddencity. A&E’s recent “Forbidden City: Dynasty and Destiny,” part of its series exploring “ancient mysteries,” also takes you inside the walls and examines the events that led to the fall of the Qing Dynasty. Mysteriously, none of the official Forbidden City Web sites seems to be operating, but there is a virtual tour, www.beijingtrip.com/attractions/forbidden, available from Chinese travel company Beijing Trip. If all else fails, you might instead visit the ornate interior of Seattle’s Fifth Avenue Theatre, www.5thavenue.org, a 1926 building modeled after three of Imperial China’s greatest architectural achievements, among them the Forbidden City.