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 ...