In the countdown to Wallpaper International’s pick for best new private house, to be announced this coming Thursday, January 10, this new Villa harks back to an earlier European project: Mobius House by UN Studio. Set on a sloping site in upstate New York, the house is an extruded box, with two protruding levels forming the upstairs bedrooms. Curved surfaces create cave-like spaces that break open into expansive walls of glass.
"I always loved
the idea of hotels,
of the journey
around a room"
~Christian Lacroix
Awaiting A Return
As I bounce around online looking for images I always look for the extraordinary, the esoteric, the naive, and the emblematic of a time; works that are not the pieces we often see in design history books.
Just as a map helps us find our way and shows us where we are, looking at design from years past helps us better understand the trajectory contemporary design has taken. DesignObserver.
The novelist Alison Lurie wrote:
“Whatever is worn on the head is a sign of the mind beneath it.”
Stephen Jones, the greatest milliner of his generation, disagrees.“Whatever is worn on the head
is a sign of what a person would like to be.
Hats are a passport
to another world.”
“Get used to it”, he said, "before you go out. Then you will wear it with nonchalance.”
Some may frown on Tim Davis' photographs of famous paintings. For one thing, it appears that his camera's flash intrudes upon and harms each masterpiece. However, the artist doesn't use a flash at all, instead relying on the light provided by sources within the museums where the works are housed.
Davis shoots them from angles that accentuate the available light and then creates prints that reveal the physique of the paintings.
The added beams of light modify our sense of these mostly familiar images. In certain pieces the light reveals texture (the aged paint cracks in Corot's Evocation of Love); in others it alters the figures (notably the child, now resembling a specter, in Monet's Un Coin d'Appartement).
"One day [photographer Hendrik Kerstens' daughter] Paula came back from horseback riding. She took off her cap and I was struck by the image of her hair held together by a hair-net.
It reminded me of the portraits by the Dutch masters and I portrayed her in that fashion."
A number of the portraits of Paula are very reminiscent of Johannes Vermeer. The austerity of the photograph, its clarity, the serene expression on the young girl’s face, untouched by the experiences of adult life and, not least, the characteristic ‘Dutch’ light, all combine to create this impression.
Bag (detail) by Hendrik Kerstens, 2007 National Portrait Gallery
L’esprit de l’escalier or esprit d’escalier (stairway wit) is the sense of thinking of a clever comeback in an encounter when it is too late.
The phrase can be used to describe a riposte to an insult, or any witty, clever remark that comes to mind too late to be useful—when one is on the “staircase” leaving the scene of the encounter.
The phenomenon is usually accompanied by a feeling of regret at having not thought of the riposte when it was most needed or suitable.
Featured: Stairway at the Louvre, Paris, 2007
In this classic novel of old New York, Edith Wharton recreates the city of her girlhood in the 1870s. The Arion edition has been illustrated with photographs of the actual settings of the story.
“Truly a thing of beauty” according to Forbes magazine, this edition celebrates a classic of American literature. The book has a special status as an affectionate record of the streets and buildings of New York City. At every moment of the novel the reader knows where the characters are, walking down a particular street, standing in front of a certain address, looking out the window of a familiar room.
The Arion Press edition is illustrated with images of the novel's actual setting, as they are today, captured by noted photographer Stephen Shore who brought to this project a personal knowledge of the historic buildings and streets that made up Wharton's New York world.
New York Times art critic Michael Kimmelman raved: "The work’s laconic eloquence speaks of an era and a nation."
Francis Bacon's sickly serene Self Portrait 1971 is a refracted faceted face akin to some of Paul Cézanne's self-portraits which are reminiscent of cut precious gem stones reflecting light. Bacon painted with a very dry brush giving the sensation of a granular, grainy effect.
The melancholia mood is of a man melting before you: a disturbing image of a disturbed man in a disturbed century. This is one of the last great self-portraits Bacon painted before he went off the rails and went back into to the lazy worn grooves of inane illustration.
Errant Aesthete
Q: What natural gift would you most like to possess?
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