Reference Page: June 2007

The Second (and Third) Coming
Ever wonder where the name Shaker came from? It is actually taken from the Elaine Benes–style dance moves of strange communal hops that the United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing used to host. Misunderstood by their fellow countrymen, the traditional dance led to this unfor­tunate name. Etymologies aside, Shakers were some of the finest furniture makers in the history of American craft, and their superior workmanship had an enormous influence on the tradition, including Modernist designers like Antonio Citterio who inflected their work with a Shaker aesthetic. Vermont’s Shelburne Museum, www.shelburnemuseum.org, is exhibiting historical pieces, artifacts, and contemporary work influenced by the tradition, which flourished in New England, through the end of October. Next year the show is also traveling to the Bard Graduate Center, www.bard.edu/bgc/exhibit. By way of contrast, more kitschy examples of the style as it has been interpreted by contemporary furniture makers can be seen at www.modernshakerfurniture.com, which sells original handcrafted pieces by wood­workers in Vermont.

A Display of Talent
The portable Day Labor Station, designed by the nonprofit Public Architecture, www.publicarchitecture.org, provides a vital service to the largely invisible workers, giving them the dignity of a professional setting as well as basic amenities. The first-ever comprehensive study of day laborers, published by the Center for the Study of Urban Poverty in January 2006, www.sscnet.ucla.edu/issr/csup/uploaded_files/Natl_DayLabor-On_the_Corner1.pdf, offers insight into the geographical makeup of freelance workers, among other details. Public Architecture’s project site, www.daylaborstation.org, features a gallery with pictures from the installation at Cooper-Hewitt’s exhibition Design for the Other 90%, along with a series of day-laborer portraits.

End of the Line
Coney Island is to lower Brooklyn what your crazy uncle is to Thanksgiving dinner: sure, he’s a bit bizarre and inappropriate with the in-good-fun ethnic jokes and affectionate taps on the ass, but, hey, he gives the table some character. Coney Island could very well lose its signature smorgasbord of freakish delights if the city sides with bigwig developers on zoning rules. How fitting that the campaign against Coney Island residential develop-ment has a presence on MySpace, www.myspace.com/saveconeyisland, with its mishmash of random characters who leave Shakespearean protest messages such as “Fair is foul, and foul is fair. Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood clean from his hand? Out, damned spot! out, I say!” Be sure to see the Coney Island History Project’s exhibit, www.coneyislandhistory.org, under the Cyclone this summer, for artifacts from previous Coney Island incarnations, aerial photos, and your chance to submit your favorite memory for posterity at the Memory Booth.

Push-Button Rewiring
Herman Miller, the godfather of furniture manufacturers, is spreading its wings. In an effort to keep up with the expanding marketplace and its focus on sustainable design, the company is getting into the electrical business with its newest product, Convia, whose latest move is profiled this month by Peter Hall. For more information on this particular system, go to www.hmconvia.com: the “product benefits” and “offerings” sections on the left simplify what at first seems like a complex gadget. Those interested in sustainable lighting and power sources on a slightly smaller scale should investigate their options at www.greenbuilder.com/sourcebook/Lighting.html. Or pick up Mick Winter’s Sustainable Living: For Home, Neighborhood, and Community (Westsong Publishing, 2007), a self-help book on how to use less energy.

 Diller, Gehry, and the Glass Schooner on West 18th Street
It is really surprising, but Frank Gehry’s Web site, www.foga.com, is crap. Search and search, and you will not find one image of the contorted steel buildings that put this Toronto native on the map. It’s a good thing that for his latest ­project—IAC—his boss was Barry Diller, media mogul and husband of fashionista Diane von Furstenberg. Never one to let a branding opportunity fall by the wayside, Diller, with the help of his team, has created the ultimate architecture vanity site, www.iacbuilding.com, to showcase the glass behemoth in all its glory. Roll over the “navigate” tool on the right, and seven ways to “explore” and “experience” appear before your eyes. Click again for access to slide shows and an animated 360-degree rendering of the exterior. If that doesn’t completely satisfy, a short but detailed case study about the building’s structural system can be found at www.cement.org/buildings/buildings_office_IAC.asp.

Dreaming in Code
Jonathan Harris is the shit. I mean, whoever has the guts to take on the Goliath of search engines, Google, is pretty hard-core in our opinion. His postmodern take on searching the Web is not only innovative but outright inspiring. If you haven’t checked out the eight sites listed in Andrew Blum’s story, then stop reading right now and do so. If you have and are thirsty for more, then you need not Google—everything you want to know about the 27-year-old heartthrob is at www.number27.org. Four tabs top center direct viewers to “Work,” a summary of his sites; “Biography,” a thorough profile with related hyperlinks; “Press & Awards,” a grocery list of achievements; and “Everything Else,” a virtual sketchbook of vivid watercolors and a set of samplers of his commercial work. A book based on the Web site www.wefeelfine.org, tentatively dubbed The Encyclopedia of Human Emotion, is in the works for this holiday season. His latest virtual (ad)venture, www.thewhalehunt.com, launching this summer, will document Harris’s camping on the Arctic Ocean for five days while photographing an Inupiat Eskimo whale hunt in Alaska. Seriously, could he be any cooler?

Healthy Obsession
Hey there, your body’s really toxic. And that’s not a pickup line. If the Body Burden pros at the Human Toxome Project, www.ewg.org/sites/humantoxome, could find 38 toxins in architect and clean-materials advocate Robin Guenther’s body, then imagine all the chemicals they can find in someone who doesn’t work in a green environment, uses plastic products regularly, and averages around three big bags of Doritos a week. Anxious? Well, you can shell out about $10,000 and suffer through a plethora of needle pokes to find out your “body assessment,” or you can opt for the cheaper (and much less accurate) online assessment at extras.insidebayarea.com/bodyburden/bodyburden.html. Upon discovering that you are in fact a human landfill, be sure to lobby for safer, nontoxic health-care construction materials when the next hospital or clinic is setting up in your town. The Green Guide for Health Care, www.gghc.org, coordinated in part by Guenther, is an essential tool.

Forever Helvetica
All histories have their wars, and typeface
history is no exception. Take for example the long-standing battle between Helvetica, the 1950s Swiss-designed font, and Arial, the modern-day Microsoft rip-off that has prompted designers to raise their stinging San-ford pencils against the pretender. (See Mark Simonson’s “The Scourge of Arial,” www.ms-studio.com/articles.html.) You can literally join the fight with Engage Studio’s online typeface game, www.engagestudio.com/helvetica, where the player takes on the role of Helvetica letters and tries to smash the Arial alphabet before it can do the same. For typeface pacifists who want to avoid letter-to-letter combat, Gary Hustwit’s Web site for his film, www.helveticafilm.com, offers trailers, clips, blog posts, and screening dates that will quench the thirst for knowledge rather than en-courage bloodlust. Pentagram graphic designer and blogger Armin Vit, not featured in the Helvetica film but a typeface documentarian in his own right, offers a clip from his short video interviewing Chicagoans on the street about their font preferences: www.underconsideration.com/random/gotham_do.mov.