Reference Page: July 2008

38 Reality Check
After 14 years as an architect, Michael Selditch switched to a successful career in reality TV. (Bored with your architecture job? Look for guidance at www.selditch.com.) Following two seasons as a director of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, he recently finished his second documentary, on Project Runway star Jay McCarroll. With Archi­tec­ture School, Selditch finally reconciles his two passions. In this six-part reality show, viewers follow Tulane students (architecture.tulane.edu) as they design and build a home for struggling New Orleanians. The trailer (www.maxvacinc.com/public/arch-trailer.mp4) has classmates discussing how “totally excited” they are to get out of their comfort zone. But this is the Sundance Channel: instead of love triangles and mud fights, there are discussions about how architecture can impact underserved communities. See Tulane students’ work at www.tulaneurbanbuild.com.

58 Industrialists Without Factories
This summer, New York’s Museum of Modern Art (www.moma.org) goes prefab. In factories and warehouses around the world, modules are being built and will be shipped in containers to a vacant lot west of the museum.
To follow the assembly process, go to www.momahomedelivery.org. Starting July 20, you’ll be able to tour the 76-square-foot Micro Compact Home, by Richard Horden (www.hcla.co.uk) and Haack and Höpfner (www.haackhoepfner.com). You can also visit the more luxurious four-story Cellophane House, by Kieran Timberlake Associ­ates (www.kierantimberlake.com), a translucent building pre­fabricated at Kullman Buildings’ factory in New Jersey. The 80-year-old construction company, which once specialized in prefab diners, is particularly proud of its work for the 2004 Yale spring-break challenge, when it managed to set up a turn-of-the-century-style dorm on the New Haven campus in just four days (www.kullman.com/yale2.html).

90 Exporting the Quad
From Duke University’s medical school in Singapore to Georgetown University’s Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service, in Qatar, American-style education is increasingly available around the world. In this “global village,” architecture firms are re-adapting the American college campus to unlikely settings, whether in the Per­sian Gulf states or rural India. Moore Ruble Yudell (www.­moorerubleyudell.com) excels in creating master plans of little cities, complete with housing, entertainment, transportation, and sports facilities. These designs, and ones by other firms, aim to encourage a casual, U.S. version of socialization. At the American School of Doha, in Qatar, RMJM Hillier is using a lot of glass and few private offices to build interactions between teachers and students. Intimate gardens at the Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, in Singapore, are designed to promote spontaneous meetings. (See these projects at www.hillier.com/­portfolio.) To find out how foreign students adapt to university life Stateside, read this recent New York Times article on efforts to attract Middle Eastern women to single-sex colleges (search www.nytimes.com for “global classrooms” and “­sisters”).

96 Ultimate Collector
If we had to be any billionaire—a contingency we probably dream about too often—we’d be Eli Broad. Sure, he’s had his questionable dealings: playing puppet master with Oakland schools (www.­eastbayexpress.com/news/eli_s_experiment/Content?oid=518210), spreading tract homes to the country’s dusty corners (www.kbhome.com), and brokering the construction of a Los Angeles public school whose failings span cost and style. (As one Los Angeles Times columnist tells it, $200 million is a lofty sum for a metallic tower that calls to mind a “roller coaster,” “ski jump,” “toboggan run,” and “water slide”: www.latimes.com/news/­columnists/la-me-lopez4-2008may04,0,2222585.­column.) Still, Broad deserves some credit for tossing dollars to the arts, contested though they may be. His $1 billion Modern-art collection is an extraordinary sight, with its Jasper Johns flags and 20-plus Lichtensteins, Warhol car crashes, and Kiki Smith ooze jars. Much of the work is searchable at www.­broadartfoundation.org. Better online than not at all, since Broad famously reneged on plans to donate his collection to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, where he has been a longtime trustee. In the words of Martin Filler, architecture critic of the New York Review of Books, it was “the worst public relations disaster to befall an art institution” since the Getty antiquities scandal two years earlier (www.nybooks.com/articles/21134). Reviews of LACMA’s new Broad Contemporary Art Museum were equally dire: “remarkably uninspired,” the New York Times’s Nicolai Ouroussoff wrote; “a mixed metaphor,” Filler observed; “inside,” Christopher Hawthorne, architecture critic of the Los Angeles Times, wrote, “the building is well-behaved to a fault.” The capital misstep, he continued, was of competing visions: the tycoon’s versus the art director’s, with the architect left to reconcile the two in what can only be described as failed diplomacy. Broad, for his part, appears unfazed. He’s pushing ahead with yet another eponymous art museum, this one by the temperamental starchitect (as if there were any other kind) Zaha Hadid (www.­zaha-hadid.com). Whether the project suffers similar errors is neither here nor there. The moral of the story? Billionaires do what they please. We’ll keep dreaming.

100 Speaking from Experience
Tonychi and Associates’s home page has “designer” written all over it. Enter the flash site at www.­tonychi.com, and a lofty catchphrase appears (“the art of emotion, space, experience + ­living”), then fades as words drift across the screen. It’s like meditation: “furniture,” “architecture,” “interiors,” “accessories,” revelation! Then there’s the “news” link, which awes with its lengthy awards section, and a company profile that offers the usual boosterish claims: “tonychi and associates is a New York City–based global design powerhouse. …Its founder and president, Tony Chi…has created a design powerhouse of unrivalled reputation and global reach.” All of which might be true, but it doesn’t tell us much about the work. HGTV, weirdly, does. The show Public Places, Private Spaces recently featured Chi’s Bruno Jamais Restaurant Club, on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, a lovely confection of wine-glass chandeliers, chocolate-mohair chairs, and polka-dot sofas. Photos and a concise description of the club, in addition to Chi’s home-decorating tips, are available at www.hgtv.com/hgtv/shows_pps/episode (search for “Tony Chi”). Sadly, not even a beautiful interior can save a bad restaurant. Read Adam Platt’s review of the new Chi-designed South Gate at www.nymag.com/restaurants/reviews/47008.

114 French Revolution
When he isn’t reshaping the skylines of the world’s capitals, Pritzker Prize–winner Jean Nouvel likes to design electronic faucets (www.jadousa.com/collectionsMainasp?collectionID=1340), minimalist sofas (www.bonluxat.com/a/Jean_Nouvel_Skin_Sofa.html), and leather armchairs (www.matteograssi.it). True Nouvel fans eat with comely cutlery designed by the Dr. Evil doppelganger (www.georgjensen.com). For other French furniture designers, visit some of Manhattan’s new Gallic galleries. Start with Twenty First/Twenty First (www.21st21st.com), in Chelsea, then head to Gallery R’Pure (www.galleryrpure.com), a few blocks east. On July 14, celebrate Bastille Day on a bright-pink Pierre Paulin love seat (www.ligne-roset-usa.com; click “About Ligne Roset” and “News”) or a Philippe Starck chair (go to baccarat.­neimanmarcus.com and search for “Starck”).

118 Traffic Report
Traffic might not be the stuff of art—Jacques Tati notwithstanding—but one thing it’s sure to inspire is supercool signage. Consider the virtual crosswalk, which beams plasma lasers of ambling pedestrians across intersections, slowing cars to a halt like some sort of Jedi trick (search “virtual wall” at www.yankodesign.com). Or the Drivemocion, an emoticon attached to rear windshields that conveys drivers’ moods, thus rendering—we can only hope—the middle
finger obsolete (www.youtube.com/watch?v=xoNYgogTui8). There’s a rich history of this stuff: Charles Marshall’s whimsical ­single-hand-clock signals, which peppered Aus­tralian roads until about 30 years ago (gadgets.boingboing.net/2008/06/02/charles-marshalls-co.html), and Ger­many’s Ampelmann (www.ampelmann.de), the much loved, hat-­donning “Little Traffic Light Man” who has illuminated German crosswalks for nearly half a century. If traffic signs are any indication of national character, surely the Ampel­mann embodies Teutonic vigilance worthy of Fritz Lang’s M; disobey the flashing red figure and natives might call you a “child murderer.” Read one British journalist’s dis­maying account at blogs.guardian.co.uk/art/category/classics_of_everyday_design.