Russel Wright House and Studio, East 48th St

In my last blog entry, I mentioned a possible connection between architect William Lescaze’s house on East 48th Street and designer Russel W...

William Lescaze House, 211 East 48th St

While reading Sidewalk Critic: Lewis Mumford’s Writings on New York recently, I came across a 1934 article by Mumford on William Lescaze’s M...

Kenneth Goldsmith: the New York Trilogy

Kenneth Goldsmith’s “conceptual writing” has been the subject of some debate in recent years, much of it fuelled by Goldsmith’s provocative ...

Design in the Divided City, or, the Myrtle Avenue Style

“But I saw a street called Myrtle Avenue, which runs from Borough Hall to Fresh Pond Road, and down this street no saint ever walked (else i...

Design in the Divided City

My essay, Design in the Divided City, or the Myrtle Avenue Style, has just been published in the new issue of Design, Philosophy, Politics. ...

Design-Art: Coding and Recoding Design

While no one today would dare define good design, there are, as I suggested in my recent series Signs of Design, some quite specific objects...

Signs of Design III

Undesign: from Wal-Mart to the 99 Cent StoreWhile there is not likely to be any controversy in referring to the objects of my previous two c...

Signs of Design II

Design for All: Value-Added LifestylesIn 1999, the retail chain Target began a partnership with architect and designer Michael Graves in an ...

Signs of Design

Twenty-first century design seems impossible to define, not least because the word “design” covers such a wide variety of objects and practi...

The Kalita Humphreys Theater, Dallas

On a sloping site overlooking Turtle Creek, a couple of miles from downtown Dallas, stands one of Frank Lloyd Wright’s final projects, the K...

Dallas, Texas: Architecture and Urbanism

It’s a good Cold War story that has taken on mythological proportions: In the 1980s, brutal Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu aired the so...

A Portrait of the Architect as Artist: Frank Gehry in New York

America’s most famous architect, with a career stretching back forty years, only recently completed his first freestanding building in Ameri...

The New New Museum

In the last decades of the 19th century, after decades of revivals in European art and design, an avant-garde emerged that was committed to ...