Reference Page: May 2008

86 Stamp of Approval
It’s not an original La Chaise, but fans of midcentury Modern furniture will still squeal: the U.S. Postal Service’s new Eames stamp sheet features 16 examples of the couple’s work, and at just over $6, it’s eminently more affordable. Go to www.usps.com/household/stampcollecting/welcome.htm. The Ameri­can Philatelic Society (www.stamps.org) is an excellent resource for burgeoning and seasoned stamp collectors, as is Linn’s Stamp News (www.linns.com), the world’s largest stamp weekly. For more information on Charles and Ray, go to www.eamesfoundation.org, or send a letter to 203 Chautauqua Blvd., Pacific Palisades, CA, 90272. Eames-stamped envelopes preferred.

90 Dubai, Doha
In Dubai, the city of “the latest superlative,” to quote the New York Times, it was inevitable that sustainability would turn into a piss-ing match, that eco-design would impart status, and that green would be plated gold. Consider Atkins Middle East (www.atkins-me.com), which has sired the low-carbon-emitting Dubai International Financial Cen­tre Lighthouse (www.difc.ae) and the Bahrain World Trade Center (www.bahrainwtc.com), whose turbine-equipped airfoils bear a striking resemblance to Picasso’s vagina dentata. Of course, this brand of showboating isn’t exclusive to Dubai. The New Mexico architect Michael Rey­nolds has parlayed an affinity for trash-and-tire dwellings into a starring role in the documentary Garbage Warrior (www.­garbagewarrior.com) and a heroically awkward appearance on The Colbert Report. In San Francisco, a more polished strain of ’60s nostalgia is behind a 1.7-million-square-foot curving steel spire by Pelli Clarke Pelli Architects. The Transbay tower will have a bio-filter air-exchange system, passive solar shading, and wind turbines that illuminate its top. It will be the city’s tallest, newest, and possibly greenest building­­—in short, the latest superlative. Visit www.pcparch.com/transbay/citypark.swf.

114 It’s Not Business as Usual
Hey, high-powered executive! For $11,000, Stanford’s three-day Design Thinking Boot Camp (www.stanford.edu/group/dschool/projects/bootcamps.html) offers you the chance to “Develop Deep Consumer Insights” and “Empower Your Employees To Be Innova­tive.” For a cheaper introduction, go to www.creativeclass.com, where the best-selling author Richard Florida discusses the growing role of creativity in our economy. Since design might very well be the future of business (or is it the other way around?), this list of hybrid programs should be helpful: www.designmba.org/resources/schools_alpha.html.

137 Modern Paradise
After its stay at the Honolulu Academy of Arts (www.­honoluluacademy.org), Hawaiian Modern: The Architecture of Vladimir Ossipoff will travel to the Deutsches Architekturmuseum, in Frankfurt, Germany, and then to Yale in the fall. The exhi­bition catalogue (Yale University Press, 2007), edited by
Dean Sakamoto (www.dsarch.net), includes shots of the Thurston Memorial Chapel, at the Punahou School, Barack Obama’s alma mater: www.punahou.edu. (For a hard-­hitting analysis of Obama’s love of basketball, a sport he took up at Punahou, go to www.nytimes.com/2007/06/01/us/politics/01hoops.html.) Among Ossipoff’s other work is the Outrigger Canoe Club (www.outriggercanoeclub.com), near Waikiki Beach, where the first-ever beach-volleyball game was supposedly played, in 1915. The club’s bars and restaurants are open-air lanais, suggesting the architect’s breezy summation of the Hawaiian style: “We have a much more casual way of being formal than you do in the ­mainland.”

152 Lighting the Way
On the opening day of Heathrow’s $8.6 billion Terminal 5, the baggage system collapsed and hundreds of flights were canceled; Britain’s aviation minister called it “a blow to national pride.” T5 was supposed to bring glamour back to travel, but, instead, angry passengers slept on the floor and Naomi Campbell was arrested for allegedly assaulting a police officer. (Google “Naomi” and “Heath­row” to find out more.) On the upside, passengers waiting for flights and luggage had plenty of face time with the terminal’s art installations, curated by Artwise (www.artwisecurators.com). Cloud, a large kinetic sculp-­­­ture by Troika, hangs over an escalator: www.youtube.com/watch?v=42hgPLL8IrA. And in the Concorde lounge, VIPs are hypnotized by Christopher Pearson’s (www.­christopherpearson.com) installation of British Airways’ mascots, Pegasus and the Winged Lion: www.youtube.com/watch?v=yuILtM2WO6g.

164 Process Makes Perfect Konstantin Grcic is famous, or at least famous for a designer. Certainly, his place in the celebrity firmament is deserved, but as Michael Bierut wrote in a 1995 Communication Arts essay, “Becoming famous isn’t really all that difficult.” Here we present eight simple rules for finding fame à la Konstantin: 1. Go to cabinet-making school. Grcic attended Parnham College in the U.K., but any institution with wood and saws will do. It’s the
furniture designer’s equivalent of street cred. Find schools at education-portal.com/cabinet_making_schools.html.
2. Make an uncomfortable chair. Critics will love it, because it screams “rebellious.” See Grcic’s posture-defying Chaos seat at www.­konstantin-grcic.com. 3. Write a book, the more pictures the better. Grcic’s, KGID (Konstantin Grcic Industrial Design) (Phaidon, 2005), has 300. 4. Be ready for the media. Designboom once asked Grcic to name his favorite color, poet, and military enterprise, and how he’d like to die. (“Prepared for it,” he said.) Read the interview
at www.designboom.com/eng/interview/grcic.html. 5. Be German. 6. Be a savvy entrepreneur. For Myto, Grcic partnered with the Italian manufacturer Plank (www.plank.it) and the behemoth chemical company BASF (www.basf.com). An unlikely trio, to be sure, but good for business. 7. Make a cool cantilever chair that T Magazine breathlessly calls “the most-talked-about chair of the moment.” 8. “Be nice,” as Bierut advises, quoting his mother.

170 Moment of Reckoning
Jon Gertner’s essay was prompted by a 7,935-word article he wrote
last year for the New York Times Magazine, ominously titled “The Future Is Drying Up.” (Search for his name at www.nytimes.com.) A former editor at Money, Gertner joins a storied tradition of writers expounding on the American West’s dry spells. Wallace Stegner penned an epic biography of the Colorado River explorer Maj. John Wesley Powell that is as much an account of Lake Powell’s one-armed namesake as a critique of colonizing inhosp­itable land. Beyond the Hundredth Meridian (Penguin, 1992), first published in 1954, has had a host of succes­sors: Charles Wilkinson’s Crossing the Next Meridian (Island Press, 1993), Donald Worster’s Rivers of Empire (Pantheon, 1986), and Marc Reisner’s Cadillac Desert (Penguin Group, 1986). Up-to-date water-conservation resources are at the Pacific Institute: www.pacinst.org.

228 Text Message
Don’t miss our favorite video of the month: two designers from the Swedish firm Front (www.frontdesign.se) creating furniture with their fingers. Strokes
in the air are recorded with video tech­nology, turned into digital files, and
sent to a machine that churns out white plastic furniture: www.­youtube.com/watch?v=8zP1em1dg5k. (It reminds
us of Picasso’s painting on glass: www.youtube.com/watch?v=7vgAYTC9bRY.) The Museum of Modern Art (www.moma.org) featured Front in the exhibition Design and the Elastic Mind, up through May 12, where Sketch Furniture’s neighbors include Stuart Karten’s Epidermits Interactive Pet (www.kartendesign.com), a creature made of engineered human tissue. If you still prefer Scandinavian whimsy, visit Galerie Kreo (www.galeriekreo.com) for a lamp with an invisible light bulb and shelves that seem to float, both by Front.