Waiting for Hurricane “My Name is Earl” to gather over the Northeast. We will be descending nonetheless on Cape Ann for a weekend of nuptial celebrating with Alexis and JP. So begins a month of wonderful wedding weekends. Life happens like that, big shifts that occur all at once, like the culmination of storm systems […]
Architecture
Sensory Intimacy, in Art and in Architecture
Sensuality afoot at the Metropolitan Museum The gift that just keeps giving…I don’t think there is a single page of my copy of Juhani Pallasmaa’s The Eyes of the Skin that isn’t marked up and annotated. Although Pallasmaa is an architect and writing primarily about that metier, his book is full of passages that are […]
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Architecture and Beauty
Another book that sounds like it is right in my sweet spot: Architecture and Beauty: Conversations with Architects about a Troubled Relationship, by Yael Reisner. Ah, beauty… It continues to be an issue of dispute in every contemporary métier—visual art, music, literature. This topic continues to engage, divide, provoke, perplex. I know a bit about […]
Human Rootedness
The dominance of the eye and the suppression of the other senses tends to push us into detachment, isolation and exteriority. The art of the eye has certainly produced imposing and thought-provoking structures, but it has not facilitated human rootedness in the world. The fact that the modernist idiom has not generally been able to […]
Inside and Outside, at the Same Time
Photo: From the Brooklyn Museum of Art Another evocative passage by way of Juhani Pallasmaa’s The Eyes of the Skin. (More quotes from the book here, and more will be posted in the future since I have been in a state of awe regarding this book for some time.) The role of the hand and […]
Volumetric Light
7 World Trade Center: Lucid facades of glass, designed by James Carpenter (Photo: Wired New York) James Carpenter was a glass artist for 30 years (and studying/collaborating with Dale Chihuly while he was at RISD) prior to his more recent involvement in architectural projects. His approach involves using glass not to just create enclosures but […]
Focused vs Peripheral Vision
Packing material in my studio which confounds the eye depending on which way you look at it. Focus vs peripheral sight at play… I’ve referenced one of my greatest recent finds several times on this blog—The Eyes of the Skin by architect Juhani Pallasmaa. I’ve been rereading this slim volume and can’t not share just […]
More Advocacy Like This, Please
Dutch architects MVRDV’s design for a cantilevered holiday home in Suffolk, UK. We all admire heroic acts, but this is one I hadn’t expected. Author Alain de Botton (Consolations of Philosophy, The Art of Travel, among others) is commissioning architects to build purposefully experimental homes that he will make available for holiday rentals on a […]
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Greatness, with Grace
Architect Jeanne Gang (Photo: Chicago Tribune) Paul Goldberger wrote about architect Jeanne Gang and her new shimmery addition to the Chicago skyline (a tower named Aqua, which is quite evocative isn’t it?) in a recent issue of the New Yorker. Goldberger is particularly impressed with the distinctive 82-story apartment building, citing its remarkable blend of […]
The Whitney and Other Museum Sorrows
Roberta Smith continues her one-woman campaign (or so it seems—are there others on this bandwagon?) of bringing thoughtful and reasonable thinking to the world of art making, viewing and buying. Like so many other subcultures, this is one that regularly runs off the rails and into the hollers of ego, greed and elitism. Her recent […]