Artsy
Stanley Kubrick’s Meticulous Set Designs Made His Films Strikingly EerieStanley Kubrick once said that “most films are little more than stage plays with more atmosphere and action.” Going beyond the relationships between a scene and a sentence...
Chateau International
Dope and Diamonds: A Lana Del Rey ReaderLana is variously lethargic and confrontational, vulgar yet deeply sensitive. Her contradictions are rehearsed and precise. She also represents a nuanced, vulnerable and flawed femininity rarely explored in contemporary pop, exposing the emptiness and hypocrisy of sloganistic corporate feminism...
Chateau International: Récit
Eau!The ‘dancing’ fountain was first described by Hero of Alexandria, a mathematician and engineer from Roman Egypt: “A bird made to whistle by flowing water. A trumpet sounded by flowing water. Birds made to sing and be silent alternately by flowing water.”
Disegno
All in the BalanceThere is a distinct lack of dogma to the designer Peter Ghyczy’s practice. Although concerned primarily with function, his approach has never discounted form, decoration, beauty or, indeed, even the principle of design as a sort of divine intervention.
Elephant
Is Political Satire a Match for the Times We Live In?Satire has a long and complicated history, with writers using wit and parody to draw attention to cracks and flaws in society from Ancient Egypt all the way through to contemporary life...
Elephant
Ornament Takes on New Meaning at Artmonte-CarloMonaco’s beach-front promenade stretches along much of the principality’s coastline, interrupted by luxury beach clubs, rocky cliff edges, private villas, the occasional drained pool and, for the last few years, construction boards depicting a photographic render of the horizon line they obscure...
Elephant
The Seductive, Revelatory Art of TV DramaThis year marks two decades since the pilot episode of Sex and the City. When Carrie Bradshaw first broke the fourth wall, Samantha Jones introduced us to the rules of the free-market-feminism...
Eye on Design
What Does #MeToo Gain by Winning “Brand of the Year?”Do we risk over-simplifying complex social + political movements or do awards like these keep the activist spirit alive?
It's Nice That
A City of Contradictions: Meet the People Shaping Beirut’s Creative FutureBeirut is a city of contradictions, both buoyed and bound by its past and present the push and pull between its history and future is particularly acute in the divergent experiences of older and younger generations...
It's Nice That
An Exercise in Style: Interviewing John MorganAs we ascend the stairs from his subterranean studio, our conversation turns to the subject of design writers. “Are there any? And if there are, why?” A point of contention is, if they do exist, “can [they] write about a subject other than design in an interesting way...
It's Nice That
Eduardo Paolozzi: On a Singular Teacher and His Devil-May-Care Philosophy“It’s the one with the red motorcycle outside” said David Queensberry as he gave directions to his west London home. The former head of ceramics at the Royal College of Art, and trustee of The Paolozzi Foundation had agreed to meet to reminisce on Paolozzi’s time as a tutor at the RCA...
It's Nice That
Elizabeth Friedlander: A Legacy of LettersOn her commission from the then Frankfurt-based Bauer Type Foundry in 1927, Elizabeth Friedlander became one of the first women to design a typeface, and particularly one of such exhaustive variation. Completed in a variety of point sizes in roman letter and cursive, and detailed in bold and swash characters, it took until 1939 for Elizabeth-Antigua and Elizabeth-Kursiv to be cut – six years after Friedlander had been forced to leave Germany.
It's Nice That
Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for UtopiaHippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia examined the intersections of art, architecture and design with the counterculture of the 1960s and early 1970s Shown at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis earlier this year, the exhibition was loosely organised around Timothy Leary’s famous mantra, “Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out”...
It's Nice That
M/M (Paris) and the ongoing conversations that define its practiceOn a rainy Paris morning, I met with Mathias Augustyniak and Michael Amzalag, the namesakes of renowned agency M/M (Paris), at their studio in the 10th, beside Canal Saint-Martin.
It's Nice That
The Ulm Model: A School and Its Pursuit of a Critical Design Practice“My feeling is that the Bauhaus being conveniently located before the Second World War makes it safely historical”, says Dr. Peter Kapos. “It’s objects have an antique character that is about as threatening as Arts & Crafts...
Maharam Stories
A State of National ReclineEero Saarinen had been experimenting with the idea of conversation pits for a few years when he received a commission from industrialist J. Irwin Miller to design a family home in Columbus, Indiana, in 1953...
Maharam Stories
Alvar Aalto’s Paimio Sanatorium“Human life is a combination of tragedy and comedy. The shapes and designs that surround us are the music accompanying this tragedy and this comedy,” said Alvar Aalto, whose approach to design and production was defined by...
Maharam Stories
The End of the Plain PlaneIn 1965, Alexander Girard was hired with Emilio Pucci to redesign every aspect of Braniff International Airways. Pucci was tasked with overhauling the uniforms, with Girard responsible for the design of...
Occasional Table: Distributed
Life is Good and Good For You in New YorkIt’s dry with a dash of satire – knowing and sarcastic, without losing the magic of the unreal. Gossip Girl embraced the truth of our never really leaving high school, and festooned it with the perks of adulthood...
PIN UP
Thriving, Puckering, Adoring, Warping, Glowing, Scorching: Soft Baroque’s Sun CityTanning salons — Eternal Summer, Brazil Bronze, Healthy Glow, Sun City — and their offerings — sprays and sun-bed sessions in shades of ‘Exotic Dancer’, ‘WASP Housewife’, ‘Skinny Tan’, or ‘Chocolate Brown’ (“great for body builders and ballroom dancers!”) — rose in popularity through the 1970s and 80s
Port
Anti-Morality Tales: Famous Artists from Chicago at Milan’s Fondazione PradaArtist and curator Don Baum had been teaching at Chicago’s Hyde Park Art Center for close to a decade when he started exhibiting the work of under-represented Chicago artists. It was the early 1960s and...
Port
Formal Poetry: Commemorating Carlo Scarpa’s Brion CemeteryGiuseppe Brion, the founder of Brionvega – the electronics company famous for the Cubo television – died in 1968. His wife Onorina, wanting to memorialise her husband, extended the family plot at the local cemetery...
Port
The flexible radicality of the CamaleondaCamaleonda is a portmanteau of camaleonte, meaning chameleon, and onda, meaning wave; two bodies that shift and change according to the conditions of their environment. The Camaleonda sofa...
Royal College of Art
Head, Heart & Hand: The GreenhouseThe Greenhouse was closed in the early 1990s following the end of the Environmental course a few years prior. It had been built in 1961 according to the intention of then Rector Robin Darwin, whose studio sat at the back of the ‘house amongst the canopies John Norris Wood had been appointed tutor of Natural History and Ecological Studies in 1971, caring for the plants...
Schloss Hollenegg for Design
Walden: The Will to Bloom“I went to the woods because I wanted to live deliberately”, wrote Henry David Thoreau in his 1854 book, Walden. His life at the cabin by Walden Pond is often romanticised and celebrated as a thoughtful, honourable choice. He abandoned the stresses of productivity, social pressures and the shallow obsession with the accumulation of stuff
Spike Art Magazine
Forensic Architecture at the ICAIn Counter Investigations: Forensic Architecture, the ICA opens up as a site for enquiry – both as a record of inquiries undertaken by the independent research agency Forensic Architecture, and as a space of study for the public.
This is Badland
In an elegant beach-front settingBODRUM - An archaeology of street media; signage, translation and interpretation; architectural simulation; design vernaculars and improvisations.
It's Nice That
The New Look: Looking Back at Roundel’s 1980s Identity Design for British Rail’s RailfreightAt the launch of the Design Business Association in 1986, John Bateson, a graphic designer and later partner at design agency Roundel, met a product designer who was working with British Rail’s Railfreight on a repainting scheme...
Royal College of Art
Book Test Unit: “Who Shot J.R.?”In the closing scene of the third season finale of Dallas, dastardly oil baron J.R. Ewing was shot by an unknown assailant The question of “Who shot J.R.?” plagued viewers until close to a year later, when it was revealed that he was in fact alive, and the assailant had been none other than...