Why 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%, als...

Two Hotels in St Augustine

At the beginning of the 1888-89 winter season, Henry Flagler opened two opulent hotels in St Augustine, Florida: the Ponce de Leon, and the ...

Vizcaya

After a few days in Miami Beach and a brief Atlantis drive by, we continued around Biscayne Bay to Vizcaya, the former estate of James Deeri...

Miami Beach

My image of Miami was already tainted, mostly by episodes of CSI Miami’s mythical paradise of material opulence: a world of private yachts, ...

William 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, ...

William Lescaze: Early Interiors

Continuing my research on the career of William Lescaze, I thought it worth returning to Lescaze’s New York projects of the late 1920s, whic...

Whatever 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...

Manitoga and Japan

Following my last entry on Manitoga and the picturesque tradition, this entry analyzes links between Wright’s project and Japanese design tr...

Manitoga and the 20th Century Picturesque

Following last month’s introduction to Russel Wright’s Manitoga, this month’s blog entry is a brief consideration of Manitoga in the context...

Russel Wright: Manitoga

Constructed during the 1950s, Russel Wright’s Manitoga, a seventy-five-acre estate in the Hudson River Valley, was the culmination of a desi...

The 21st Century Interior

In 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, ed...

Tadao Ando: Morimoto Restaurant

In my recent blog entries on the 21st century interior, the issue of theatricality has recurred several times. The intersection between the ...

Karim Rashid: Nooch, Kurve

Miuccia 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 ...

Philippe Starck/Ian Schrager: Designer Hotels

My last interior design case study, Naomi Leff/Ralph Lauren’s Rhinelander Mansion, served as a model of retail design as a cinematic experie...

Ralph Lauren/Naomi Leff: Rhinelander Mansion

21st Century New York Interiors

While my introduction set up an initial framework for analyzing contemporary interiors, this post will sketch out the broader social, politi...

The 21st Century Interior

The interior is a fluid and often disputed territory claimed by architects, interior designers and decorators. In his provocative essay, “Cu...

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...