tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-57711531283525990522024-03-21T07:09:07.215-04:00Critical CitiesReflections on 21st century cultureD.J. Huppatzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01143391020431255041noreply@blogger.comBlogger54125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5771153128352599052.post-9337518558602983042012-05-29T01:39:00.002-04:002012-05-29T02:26:31.866-04:00California Design: Lifestyles of Desire
Though I was in Los Angeles in February, I only recently rediscovered my notes on “California Design 1930-1965: Living in a Modern Way” (still on at LACMA) and the associated symposium “New Narratives for ‘Living in a Modern Way’”, so thought I should post them here before the exhibition finishes. In addition to the exhibition and symposium, the accompanying catalogue comprised a rare D.J. Huppatzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01143391020431255041noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5771153128352599052.post-29349579305864388302012-03-07T23:44:00.025-05:002012-03-08T00:32:32.099-05:00Los Angeles: Downtown DecoLos Angeles has been traditionally characterized in terms of a utopian image, at the forefront of the American dream of home and automobile ownership, or a dystopian image, with its clogged freeways, auto pollution, and fragmented series of disconnected communities. Its urban experience, described in Los Angeles: the Architecture of Four Ecologies as “Autopia”, is conditioned by the inescapable D.J. Huppatzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01143391020431255041noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5771153128352599052.post-90012819881034359472011-07-19T02:16:00.014-04:002011-07-19T02:42:22.459-04:00The High LineSince the opening of its first section in June 2009, the High Line has received considerable acclaim in both mainstream and specialist design media. If Frank Gehry’s 1997 Guggenheim museum spawned the “Bilbao effect” in which cities around the world sought to replicate Bilbao’s tourist and development boom by commissioning their own iconic cultural destinations, so the “High Line effect” may be D.J. Huppatzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01143391020431255041noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5771153128352599052.post-55209834929321272942011-05-24T21:48:00.021-04:002011-05-24T22:28:15.929-04:00IKEA vs MUJITwo heavyweights of contemporary lifestyle design, IKEA and MUJI, are slugging it out for control of domestic life worldwide. The objects with which they do battle are remarkably similar – functional, simple, honest, and ornament-free tools for living. However, the marketing and consumption of the two brands emphasize their essential differences through reference to widely held stereotypes of D.J. Huppatzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01143391020431255041noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5771153128352599052.post-59461375660746206172011-02-20T17:33:00.035-05:002011-02-21T06:16:36.740-05:00Philip Johnson: Glass House and New Canaan EstateLast summer, along with more Manitoga research and a visit to James Rose’s New Jersey house, I finally made the pilgrimage to Philip Johnson’s Glass House and estate in New Canaan, Connecticut. As with my Fallingwater pilgrimage a few years ago, I paid extra for the longer tour that allows more time for photos and videos, so please enjoy them. Reflecting on the two pilgrimages, I think both D.J. Huppatzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01143391020431255041noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5771153128352599052.post-54105879846110159882011-01-18T20:48:00.019-05:002011-01-18T21:43:27.287-05:00James Rose HouseAs part of my ongoing Manitoga project, I visited landscape architect James Rose’s home back in July last year. Completed in 1953, the Rose house is an unusual and little known gem of mid-century modernist design, integrating architecture, interiors, furniture design, and landscape design into a harmonious experience of serenity and tranquillity in the somewhat unlikely setting of suburban New D.J. Huppatzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01143391020431255041noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5771153128352599052.post-82645143480031544132010-11-30T23:27:00.011-05:002010-12-14T23:28:29.414-05:00Brooklyn: Retro AuthenticityWhile staying in Park Slope for a few weeks last summer, I became intrigued by Brooklyn’s retro culture. It started with the furnished apartment we rented. A veritable retro shrine, the apartment housed everything from grandma’s furniture to 1960s crockery, kitsch 1950s movie posters to a huge collection of vinyl records. Aside from a computer and television, there was scarcely anything new in D.J. Huppatzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01143391020431255041noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5771153128352599052.post-83040442580824718562010-10-22T07:13:00.010-04:002010-10-22T07:41:19.076-04:00Why Design Now?In a 2007 blog entry, I compared the last National Design Triennial, Design Life Now, with another exhibition, Design for the Other 90%, also at the Cooper-Hewitt Design Museum:“While Design Life Now: The National Design Triennial takes up the former Carnegie mansion's interiors, curator Cynthia Smith's Design for the Other 90% is, fittingly perhaps, situated outside in the garden. Coming out D.J. Huppatzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01143391020431255041noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5771153128352599052.post-41338259650974435882010-09-16T06:54:00.020-04:002010-09-16T19:54:49.051-04:00Two Hotels in St AugustineAt the beginning of the 1888-89 winter season, Henry Flagler opened two opulent hotels in St Augustine, Florida: the Ponce de Leon, and the Alcazar. These hotels represented the beginning of the “Flagler System”, comprising railroad links and resort hotels that would eventually stretch the length of Florida’s East Coast. Rivaled only by Henry Plant’s similar Plant System (based in Tampa and D.J. Huppatzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01143391020431255041noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5771153128352599052.post-69030414449205716972010-08-25T08:40:00.017-04:002010-09-16T08:22:04.326-04:00VizcayaAfter a few days in Miami Beach and a brief Atlantis drive by, we continued around Biscayne Bay to Vizcaya, the former estate of James Deering. Originally comprising an opulent mansion (constructed 1914-16), formal garden, and a working farm on 180 acres, Vizcaya remains today as a unique expression of Gilded Age America. While there were more ostentatious, and more expensive mansions D.J. Huppatzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01143391020431255041noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5771153128352599052.post-118385803012437012010-07-30T07:11:00.016-04:002010-09-16T08:22:04.326-04:00Miami BeachMy image of Miami was already tainted, mostly by episodes of CSI Miami’s mythical paradise of material opulence: a world of private yachts, pristine condo towers and sculpted bodies barely clothed in designer fashion, all rendered in impossibly saturated colors. Given the series is filmed almost entirely in a Los Angeles studio, I was bound to be disappointed when finally encountering the real D.J. Huppatzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01143391020431255041noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5771153128352599052.post-15290047229454508482010-06-10T07:28:00.009-04:002010-06-10T08:13:47.390-04:00William Lescaze: Modernism at what price today?With all my Lescaze research over the last couple of months, I've only just registered that William Lescaze's house at 32 E74th St, aka the Kramer House, is currently for sale for $14 million (the NY Observer asked "Is it worth it?"). Similar to his own midtown townhouse, the Kramer House was built by Lescaze in 1934-35, for friends, Raymond and Mildred Kramer, and is approximately 6,800 square D.J. Huppatzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01143391020431255041noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5771153128352599052.post-17425919347911335062010-05-28T09:31:00.019-04:002010-06-08T19:37:28.510-04:00William Lescaze: Early InteriorsContinuing my research on the career of William Lescaze, I thought it worth returning to Lescaze’s New York projects of the late 1920s, which comprise almost entirely interiors. Lanmon notes that in 1928, Lescaze wrote to Le Corbusier complaining that all he ever got commissioned to design was interiors – restaurants, private apartments, retail interiors and exhibition rooms – and Corbu replied D.J. Huppatzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01143391020431255041noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5771153128352599052.post-44197386669356064222010-04-29T19:55:00.020-04:002010-06-03T07:35:48.578-04:00Whatever Happened to William Lescaze?Of all the entries on this blog over the past three years, the one that has sparked the most interest in terms of emails and queries is this one on architect William Lescaze’s 1934 New York townhouse. Curiously, I have received a few emails over the past couple of years that have addressed me as some kind of expert on Lescaze’s work. While I am, in fact, far from an expert, a basic Google search D.J. Huppatzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01143391020431255041noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5771153128352599052.post-17328162830910256292010-03-25T08:04:00.009-04:002010-04-29T20:27:44.966-04:00Manitoga and JapanFollowing my last entry on Manitoga and the picturesque tradition, this entry analyzes links between Wright’s project and Japanese design traditions, particularly the parallels between Wright’s landscape design and the Edo Period “Tour Garden”. There are several dimensions to the Japanese influence on Wright’s design of Manitoga worth considering: firstly, Wright hired architect David Leavitt to D.J. Huppatzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01143391020431255041noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5771153128352599052.post-8404933276292793052010-02-28T17:30:00.018-05:002010-04-29T20:27:54.364-04:00Manitoga and the 20th Century PicturesqueFollowing last month’s introduction to Russel Wright’s Manitoga, this month’s blog entry is a brief consideration of Manitoga in the context of the picturesque tradition in architecture and landscape architecture. While Wright’s project is certainly modern, this entry is an outline of a possible historic precedent for the relationship between nature and culture that Wright developed at Manitoga. D.J. Huppatzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01143391020431255041noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5771153128352599052.post-51533368239435013752010-01-18T06:55:00.025-05:002010-04-29T20:27:54.364-04:00Russel Wright: ManitogaConstructed during the 1950s, Russel Wright’s Manitoga, a seventy-five-acre estate in the Hudson River Valley, was the culmination of a design practice that extended like a Moebius strip from the household objects of the house’s interior to the regeneration of the surrounding landscape. Manitoga’s significance was officially recognized in 2006 when it was designated a National Historic Landmark, D.J. Huppatzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01143391020431255041noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5771153128352599052.post-15669060607822331262009-12-23T20:55:00.004-05:002009-12-25T16:29:27.995-05:00The 21st Century InteriorIn order to finish off my 21st Century Interior project for the year, I have put all of the posts for 2009 together in a single document, edited them lightly and added a short conclusion. Please download here as a PDF for your reading pleasure. Note that if you want to print it out, this document is 65 pages long and contains colored pictures, as well as a full bibliography at the end.Any D.J. Huppatzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01143391020431255041noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5771153128352599052.post-24613546842402208102009-10-23T07:36:00.025-04:002009-10-23T08:20:53.200-04:00Tadao Ando: Morimoto RestaurantIn my recent blog entries on the 21st century interior, the issue of theatricality has recurred several times. The intersection between the virtual spaces of the theater or cinema, and the actual spaces of physical interiors, seems both a vital and under-theorized connection with a long and somewhat marginalized history. In the United States, for example, the earliest professional designer, ElsieD.J. Huppatzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01143391020431255041noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5771153128352599052.post-43626166888883867182009-09-30T19:54:00.020-04:002009-10-02T07:49:43.328-04:00Karim Rashid: Nooch, Kurve<!-- /* Font Definitions */ @font-face {font-family:Wingdings; panose-1:5 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0; mso-font-charset:2; mso-generic-font-family:auto; mso-font-pitch:variable; mso-font-signature:0 268435456 0 0 -2147483648 0;} @font-face {font-family:"Arial Unicode MS"; panose-1:2 11 6 4 2 2 2 2 2 4; mso-font-charset:128; mso-generic-font-family:swiss; mso-font-pitch:variable; D.J. Huppatzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01143391020431255041noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5771153128352599052.post-32682282662176335862009-08-06T08:20:00.022-04:002009-08-12T02:01:11.174-04:00Miuccia Prada/OMA/Rem Koolhaas: Prada Store“In every relationship there comes a time when you take that next important step. For some couples that step is meeting the parents, for me it's meeting the Prada.” - Carrie Bradshaw, Sex in the City, Season 6, 2003.New York’s Prada flagship store, designed by Rem Koolhaas/OMA, was the subject of much media hype when it opened in December 2001, and has accumulated a wealth of D.J. Huppatzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01143391020431255041noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5771153128352599052.post-6885720500364218852009-06-11T06:54:00.019-04:002009-06-11T07:52:46.621-04:00Philippe Starck/Ian Schrager: Designer HotelsMy last interior design case study, Naomi Leff/Ralph Lauren’s Rhinelander Mansion, served as a model of retail design as a cinematic experience, its interior spaces seamlessly integrated into Lauren’s sophisticated image-world. In this case study, I will trace the development of Philippe Starck’s New York hotel designs – the Royalton (1988), the Paramount (1990), and the Hudson (2000) – in order D.J. Huppatzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01143391020431255041noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5771153128352599052.post-20945647962924716772009-04-15T20:31:00.016-04:002009-04-15T21:26:10.687-04:00Ralph Lauren/Naomi Leff: Rhinelander Mansion<!--[if gte mso 9]> Normal 0 MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 <![endif]--><!--[if !mso]> st1\:*{behavior:url(#ieooui) } <![endif]--> <!-- /* Font Definitions */ @font-face {font-family:Tahoma; panose-1:2 11 6 4 3 5 4 4 2 4; mso-font-charset:0; mso-generic-font-family:swiss; mso-font-pitch:variable; mso-font-signature:1627421319 -2147483648 8 0 66047 0;} /* D.J. Huppatzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01143391020431255041noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5771153128352599052.post-42601299404901096152009-03-06T05:26:00.016-05:002009-03-08T21:24:06.621-04:0021st Century New York InteriorsWhile my introduction set up an initial framework for analyzing contemporary interiors, this post will sketch out the broader social, political and economic context within which my subsequent case studies will sit. The New York examples to follow are at once specific, in that they are situated in a particular city and were designed in a particular time period, but they may also provide some D.J. Huppatzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01143391020431255041noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5771153128352599052.post-57820827758910586172009-01-29T23:44:00.021-05:002009-04-16T01:56:42.126-04:00The 21st Century InteriorThe interior is a fluid and often disputed territory claimed by architects, interior designers and decorators. In his provocative essay, “Curtain Wars: Architects, Decorators, and the 20th-Century Domestic Interior”, Joel Sanders traces the 20th century “battle” for the interior by professionals from interior decoration, interior design and architecture, concluding with the idea that these once D.J. Huppatzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01143391020431255041noreply@blogger.com0