Design
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Cooper-Hewitt Museum: 21st Century Design Focus
New York Smithsonian Museum Reopens
By: - Dec 28th, 2014In its new, enlarged, and enhanced space, The Cooper-Hewitt Museum has increased its ability to present provocative and compelling perspectives on design. At its best, this museum pays homage to design as if it was great art: visitors are infused with delight and a sense of wonder by what design was, is, and what it means in our lives.
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Ben Butler
Boca Stage in Boca Raton
By: - Mar 28th, 2022"Ben Butler" is a comedy that takes place at the beginning of the Civil War. The play, by Richard Strand, is part comedy, part historical drama, and part biography. Boca Stage is presenting the play through April 10.
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Mile Long Opera at The High Line
Co-Created by Diller, Scofidio + Renfro and David Lang
By: - Oct 06th, 2018The High Line is a big idea writ large, just like operas. It forms a perfect set for Mile Long Opera. Elizabeth Diller gets a director’s credit for an opera written specially for this location by David Lang. Anne Carson is librettist and Claudia Rankine, essayist. Mile Long Opera is subtitled, a biography of 7 pm, a time of transition from work to home.
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Naumkeag Garden Party
A National Historic Landmak Celebrates
By: - Jul 27th, 2018The historic home of the Choate family, Naumkeag, located in the beautiful Berkshires of Massachusetts hosts their annual Garden Party, this Saturday. With beautiful grounds, a historic 34 room house and tours daily, this gem in Stockbridge is the place to be on July 28th.
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Naumkeag Chinese Temple Gardens Opens
Three Years and a Vision
By: - Jul 27th, 2016After a public 'Appeal' for the renovation of elements of Naumkeag, the first phase of the project has finished. Newly restored Chinese Temple Gardens and an updated landscape project have been completed. The new project opened its doors at a ribbon-cutting ceremony recently. Yo-Yo Ma and wife Jill Hornor chaired the event.
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Ralph Pucci: The Art of the Mannequin
On View at Museum of Arts and Design
By: - Feb 27th, 2015On view from March 31 to August 30, 2015, Ralph Pucci: The Art of the Mannequin is the first museum exhibition to explore the work of renowned New York-based designer Ralph Pucci, widely regarded for his innovative approach to the familiar form of the mannequin. The Museum of Arts and Design is located at Columbus Circle in New York City.
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Encountering Louis Comfort Tiffany in the Berkshires
Exquisite Windows of St. Stephen's Church in Pittsfield
By: - Aug 05th, 2014Louis Comfort Tiffany's windows adorn Pittsfield's St. Stephen's Episcopal Church at Park Square. With the exception of the sanctuary windows, the stained glass windows were commissioned either from the Tiffany Glass Company of New York or Mary Tillinghast, who had been a pupil and partner of the master of American glass John La Farge. All were created and installed in the late 1890s.
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Sochi 2014 Olympics Look of the Games
A Too Busy Patchwork Quilt of Ethnic Imagery
By: - Feb 07th, 2014The venues at Sochi look great, but like a too sweet holiday dessert, the Sochi Winter Olympics "Look" seems to try too hard to please everyone by the way it visually frames the 2014 Winter Games. Similar to Vancouver's 2010 everything including the kitchen sink approach to branding and graphic identity, Sochi's "look" works better. Too visually and perhaps ethnically layered, the " patchwork quilt" looks best on athletes' bibs and venue interiors. Perhaps, it has something to do with the Russian Character?
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Body & Soul at Museum of Arts and Design
A Dialogue with Curator Wendy Tarlow Kaplan
By: - Sep 07th, 2013The Museum of Arts and Design in New York City through March 2 is exhibiting Body & Soul: New International Ceramics. The medium has been used by artists to express a wide range of charged social issues including identity, sexuality, bullying, abuse, violence, rebellion and despair. Recently we discussed the project with Wendy Tarlow Kaplan who co curated the exhibition with Martin S. Kaplan and Laurent de Verneuil.
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2013 National Design Awards Announced
Cooper-Hewitt Museum Honors Design Achievement
By: - May 17th, 2013The National Design Awards program celebrates design as a vital humanistic tool in shaping the world, and seeks to increase national awareness of design by educating the public and promoting excellence, innovation, and lasting achievement. This year's award-winners are from a variety of design disciplines.
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The Genius of Everyday Things At MIT
Practical Simplicity Married to Functional Elegance
By: - May 03rd, 2013Hidden Heroes is a design exhibition that includes cases of objects, patent drawings, movies and advertising posters. Showcasing the importance of elegant design of seemingly simple but highly useful objects, this array of 36 classic items embodies ideals of modernism that are both relevant and popular. Here function literally follows form. In basic terms, this is the underlying story of the marriage of creativity, industry and invention.
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Brian Jewett’s Unique Baskets
Warp and Woof
By: - Apr 20th, 2013This past winter Brian Jewett worked on several new basket designs using plastic ties. Before shipping them to Snyderman-Works Gallery in Philadelphia he sent images to friends and collectors. He created an earlier version of the designs as a chandelier above our dining room table.
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NYC Phone Booth Competition Missed Call
Free Design Work Is Just Crowdsourcing for Startups
By: - Mar 17th, 2013It is unfair that public artists, designers and architects do free work to get commissions. With some fanfare, several interesting hip judges and techno startups as point entities, another Competition has taken place with little to win for all of the effort that was put forth. Taken seriously, the results from a competition to replace the antiquated and often out of order call boxes would be an imaginative series of solutions. But instead it was only a minor creative conversation. And words are cheap. Here design is shown in fits and starts and undetermined consequences.
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Tasty Gourmet Food Trucks
Though Around for Long Time, A Strong New Design Trend
By: - Dec 26th, 2012Starting in the 19th Century as Chuck Wagons on cattle drives, then becoming convenient lunch wagons in urban centers and a childhood memory as ice cream trucks, the growing and refined gastronomical convoy of Gourmet Food Trucks are now a provocative piece of the urban fabric. Their design and placement have many moving parts and add color, vitality and new sophisticated tastes to our lives.
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The Unaesthetic American Cell Tower
Ma Bell's Children Are Philistines
By: - Nov 25th, 2012For the past decade and a half, the various American phone service entities have "created" rather inelegant cell towers to expand the best service to their customers. This has been a rather lazy engineering experience. Certainly enlisting designers and sculptors to the task would have brought better results. However, some European phone companies have brought flair and a public beauty.
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Liminal Objects at Harvard's Design School
A Conference to Discuss the Object in Spatial Context
By: - Oct 25th, 2012Approaching design from differing points of view, Liminal Objects initiated a conference series at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design about design that aims to identify pressing issues within the field by exploring the designed object’s role in diverse spatial practices. Designers, academics, critics and curators looked objectively at the designed object.
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Furniture with Soul At Gallery NAGA
Referencing the Book Furniture with Soul by David Savage
By: - Jun 01st, 2012This exquisite exhibit is a continuation of Gallery NAGA's exploration of the most innovative studio furniture. The show is an assemblage of an all-star cast of furnituremakers from throughout the US and across the Atlantic. Seventeen outstanding examples from the pantheon of master furnituremakers creates a compelling visual and tactile experience to savor.
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The Emotion of Design
Why Does the Best Design Viscerally Connect To Us?
By: - Apr 26th, 2012Why do we "like" even "love" certain objects? And others we do not? Is it somehow in our DNA? How did Apple (Steven Jobs) connect so well with our wants despite what our needs are? Our objects of desire strike emotional chords. It isn't just about aesthetics, but certainly that is a major aspect of what the resonance of desire and ownership are. Designers wrestle constantly with an element's functional form. Getting it just right has less to do with science than art. This is true of a structure, object or fashion statement.
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Isamu Noguchi, Poetic Sculptor/Designer
Erasing The Line Between Form and Function
By: - Feb 26th, 2012The line between what is art and what is design is a wonderful area of connected delight. The late Isamu Noguchi was one of the greatest practitioners of this hybrid form usually as creative functional sculpture. His elegant furniture and furnishings are still in production and cherished today. His minimalist abstract sculpture are still strong statements of his eloquent visual language. Noguchi erased the line between form and function.
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Eva Zeisel, Ceramic Designer Dies At 105
A Playful Search For Beauty
By: - Dec 31st, 2011Eva Zeisel, one of the most influential industrial designers of the 20th Century who created beautifully lyrical yet practical tableware and ceramics, has died at the amazing age of 105. Zeisel estimated that she had designed 100,000 pieces of tableware. Many of her elegant curving organic pieces often appeared to have human qualities, particularly in the way they tended to hug and nestle. These playful, simple designs first produced in the 1940s are still popular.
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From Train Tracks to A Public Art Walk
Newburyport's Triumphant Clipper City Rail Trail
By: - Dec 17th, 2011After 11 years of planning, meetings, grantsmanship, engineering oversight and curating public art, Geordie Vining established the Clipper City Rail Trail on the west side of the City of Newburyport, MA. He took an unused Boston & Maine railroad right of way and created a walking, jogging and biking pathway that was enhanced by public art. The result is a true pride of place.
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The Eames Iconic Plywood Leg Splint
A Breakthrough Design Leading To New Furniture
By: - Dec 10th, 2011At the beginning of WWII, the United States War Department was in a dilemma. They needed a more modular, lightweight way of splinting wounded personnel. They turned to the creative Venice Beach based designers, Charles and Ray Eames, to help solve the problem. The Eameses had been working on molding plywood for the previous few years. Having accessible the Navy's facilities, their design team was able to develop a molded plywood splint. Sculptural and elegant, it is now a design icon.
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Josef Hoffmann: Wiener Werkstätte Designer
Influential Designer With No Moral Compass
By: - Nov 29th, 2011Josef Hoffmann was one of the major designers of the first half of the 20th Century. His work across architecture, interiors, furniture and household objects was of great technical and aesthetic beauty. Also, he lived a long time. Unfortunately, his design skill did not always correspond to his moral integrity. Somehow, he was confused at the end of his life as to why he was not honored for his creative contributions. Perhaps, it was the fact that his last major work was for the wrong client.
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Powered By Free Design
UK Pylon Competition Sought New Design
By: - Nov 29th, 2011Called Britain's "industrial soldiers," they have marched across hills and valleys carrying the UK's 400,000-volt power lines. Now the British government and National Grid are ending the 84-year-old design of the electricity pylon. A competition was held to find a more attractive 21st-century alternative to carry power across hundreds of miles of British countryside. On paper, the idea sounds great, the winning design is elegant, but once again the design community is being undervalued and having demanded from it free work.
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Boston MFA Embraces Contemporary Decorative Arts, Craft and Design As Major Commitment
New Curator and New Dedicated Gallery Space
By: - Oct 29th, 2011The Boston MFA has made a serious commttment to contemporary decorative arts. This has been a cumulative effort by Director Malcolm Rogers over the last decade and half. With the opening of the Linde Family Contemporary Art Wing in October, there was the opening of the first dedicated gallery to contemporary decorative art, the Farago Gallery. To curate this gallery and to integrate contemporary decorative arts, craft and design with the rest of contemporary visual art, the museum hired Emily Zilber as the first contemporary decorative arts curator. And this isn't all.
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