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...

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...

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. ...

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 ...

Drew Gardner: Petroleum Hat

With its inconsistent tone and self-conscious awkwardness, Drew Gardner’s second book of poetry, Petroleum Hat (2005), may already be an ear...

Starchitect Condos update

Following my last post, take a brief walk here through a new apartment at Herzog & de Meuron's 40 Bond St (really a promotional tour...

Designing Lifestyle in 21st Century New York: Starchitect Condos

The early years of the 21st century have witnessed a number of brand-name architects (henceforth starchitects) designing condominium buildin...