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As a kid, I was never one for the dinosaurs at the American Museum of Natural History. I preferred the darkened precincts of the Hayden Planetarium, specifically the giant mechanical spider that was its Zeiss Mark VI projector, a truly amazing contraption. But most of all I adored the extraordinary wildlife dioramas, with their vivid painted backdrops and proud beasts from exotic locales, trophies hauled in by men with names that seemed as if they were pulled straight from the films of the brothers Marx.

The presentation dioramas at the Harvard Museum of Natural History, wonderful in their own right, make for an excellent comparison. The animals in Cambridge are presented in large glass cases, and are arranged by region and species. This is ostensibly a more scientific presentation, though it’s hardly clinical.

It’s nice to have both options. After the jump, a few more shots from the AMNH.

Continue reading Big City, Big Game

If you’re familiar with Cambridge, or just Harvard Square, you probably know Ben Thompson’s wonderful Design Research building, now celebrating its 40th anniversary. Until recently it was home to a Crate & Barrel, a suitable tenant as it was originally conceived as a retail environment for modern furnishings. Thompson will forever be known for pioneering the “festival marketplace,” but D/R is his best work. Its plate-glass windows and thin concrete frame, coupled with reasonably priced goods, delivered on the optimistic promise of modernism, and spawned countless imitators (Gap, Pottery Barn, C&B, etc.). It’s a light and happy space—a kind of counterpoint to so many of its local contemporaries constructed of the same materials. (I’m looking at you, BGCS.) To celebrate the building’s anniversary, Thompson’s widow has organized an exhibition in the building, visible from the street, showing what D/R looked like at the moment it opened. (Lots of Marimekko!) It’s on until April, and you should definitely check it out if you’re in the area, though the good news is that a book will be coming out of it: “D/R: The Store That Brought Modern Living to American Homes,” written by Thompson and the redoubtable Alexandra Lange.

Which brings me to the subject of this post. In all the deserving publicity attendant with this installation, it has frequently been stated that D/R was the first modern furnishings store in Boston. But that’s not exactly true. In 1950, Ralph Rapson, one of the forgotten greats of midcentury design and then a teacher at MIT, opened a store, Rapson-Inc, on Darmouth Street, just off Copley Square. (It was a husband-and-wife operation run by Rapson and his wife Mary.) The image above, drawn by Rapson—he was a virtuoso draftsman—illustrated the store’s wares, which included work from the Eamses and Herman Miller. An Eames storage unit (at left), the most expensive item in the drawing, listed at $48. The rocker went for $38.50. (It now runs $479 on DWR.)

Rapson-Inc closed in 1951 (when the Rapsons left town), but it gave the Boston area a taste of what a modern design store might look like. Rapson, otherwise, has been sadly neglected in history. He was a cherubic man, and a beloved teacher—I had the pleasure to speak with him a few times. His most prominent American commission, the wonderful Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis, was destroyed to make way for a new building by Jean Nouvel. His most significant built home, the Pillsbury House, also in Minnesota, was likewise destroyed. He’s probably best remembered for his participation in the Case Studies program, and for his designs for US embassies overseas. The fine monograph on his work is highly recommended.

The two men who controlled the architectural conversation in New York (and hence America and the world) for better than two decades have recently published collections of their criticism. Paul Goldberger and Herbert Muschamp—how different their voices and predilections, and yet how confounding each could be in his own way. Goldberger: the voice of the establishment. Muschamp: the glamour-obsessed cosmopolitan. My final piece for ID magazine is a review of Building Up and Tearing Down, a collection of Goldberger’s recent writings primarily from the New Yorker. Goldberger makes for easy reading, a pleasant companion to the architectural scene, and he’s still going strong. Muschamp is gone now—he died of lung cancer in 2007—and it’s fair to say the architectural world is reduced by his absence, even if I was never a fan of either his opinions or his prose or his stewardship of the Times’s architectural coverage. Certainly, he made you pay attention, even if he set your eyes rolling. It’s hard to imagine a critic holding anywhere near the kind of power over the profession he wielded in his prime. The posthumous publication of his collected writings, Hearts of the City, makes for a good opportunity to think about his tenure, as I do in my review in the Los Angeles Times. Check ’em out.

Snow is falling hard on the Eastern Seaboard. It’s cold out there. A good weekend to stay in before a fire with your warm drink of choice and a good book. If your shelf is bare, let me humbly suggest Master of Shadows, the perfect gift for the holiday season. Here’s an excerpt to get you started. Enjoy. Stay warm. Happy Holidays.

After 55 years, ID Magazine, the grand dame of American design publishing, has shuttered. It’s a terrible blow to the design world, and especially to those of us in the extended ID family—I was a contributing editor, and wrote for the the magazine for many years. It was an honor to be a part of such a storied legacy. ID was a labor of love, and labored over by the best designers, editors, and writers in the business. I learned a great deal about a great deal from reading the magazine, and also from working as a contributor. This diversity was what made ID such a compelling magazine—it was about all the disciplines of design, from graphics to architecture to industrial design—but this broad view was also a weakness, at least in the advertising department. When news broke that ID was being put to sleep, I was—bitter irony—at work on a feature on new products designed to prevent death via sleep. My last published piece for the magazine was a review of the collected essays of Paul Goldberger, a kind of wistful book that now seems an appropriate finale. My last cover [above at right, adjacent to the magazine’s first, from 1954 and designed by Alvin Lustig] was titled “No More Tears.” I suspect that more than a few tears have been shed this week, and rightly so.

I’ll be appearing on WNYC’s Leonard Lopate Show this afternoon. If you’re in the NY area, please do tune in (93.9 FM). The show starts at noon; listen for me sometime shortly after the halfway point. Podcasts are also available for those who aren’t in range or are otherwise engaged.

In other news, I’m happy to report that a Polish-language edition of Master of Shadows will be published by Swiat Ksiazki. It is the fourth language for the book.

Please remember Master of Shadows when you’re doing your holiday shopping, and if you’ve read the book and are so inclined, Amazon reviews are most welcome.

Update: Listen to the segment here:

Every great city is unique. Each has its own special character, a certain cosmopolitan energy that is its own, the product of its people, its history, its culture, its physical form. There is also a sameness to great cities, a featurelessness or banality that is born of generic growth and standardized forms of building with standardized materials. One of the strengths of the photography of Sze Tsung Leong is his ability to render both the individuality and the sameness of cities. Shot from elevated perspectives and apparently stripped of people (actually, they’re not), they have a sense of scientific detachment. Yet they are quite clearly the product of someone with great sympathy for urban environments and those who inhabit them (Leong is a recovering architect); The places Leong depicts somehow retain their distinct humanity. The pictures here are from a recent survey of Mexico City. (His photographs of Antwerp were recently featured here.)

Continue reading The City in Pictures

The distinguished British historian Michael Burleigh has named Master of Shadows a Book of the Year in the Telegraph. He writes:

Mark Lamster’s Master of Shadows (Doubleday) is a fascinating study of the diplomatic missions of Peter Paul Rubens, a dual role for artists we are mercifully spared in the case of our treasures Damien Hirst or Tracey Emin.

Whatever your thoughts about Hirst and Emin, that’s a nice encomium. The book is also recommended on the Holiday Shopping Guide at the Fodor’s Travel Blog.

Good book reviews are rarities to be prized in these days of shuttered newspapers and diminished book coverage. By good I don’t simply mean positive. Squibs that simply condense a publisher’s press release, though appreciated, are a dime a dozen. What I mean by good is a considered, thoughtful, and fully developed examinations of a book. I am most grateful that Master of Shadows receives just that kind of review in today’s Los Angeles Times. That it also happens to be overwhelmingly positive (though not without a few minor quibbles) is extremely satisfying, to say the least. The full review is available online—please click through to support and encourage this kind of coverage—but here are a few key passages:

Mark Lamster is a brave writer….his affection for his subject is so complete—and completely convincing—his style is so gracefully unpretentious and his research is so thorough that “Master of Shadows: The Secret Diplomatic Career of the Painter Peter Paul Rubens” manages to be engaging, instructive and thought-provoking, all at once.

Lamster’s contribution is to demonstrate so clearly the interplay between Rubens’ diplomatic assignments and many of his important painterly commissions, a conjunction whose force in his career was much more consequential than other accounts of his life have allowed.

Lamster does a nicely clear-headed job of sorting out the tangled politics of the low countries during what was a violently fraught and dynamic era. His history is judiciously free of judgments, something that’s a bit of a feat when you’re dealing with heroic regimes — at least by contemporary standards—such as the embryonic Dutch Republic and one of history’s stock bad guys, Counter-Reformation Spain (with its fondness for a particularly authoritarian Catholicism backed up by the Inquisition). As he emerges in Lamster’s account, Rubens manages to be simultaneously the man of the Spanish Court—and entirely his own.

The critic, Tim Rutten, does gently admonish me for occasionally speaking for characters in the book. I will say in response only that these moments were judiciously considered, and at all times based on correspondence and not made up out of whole cloth. But, as he writes, this minor cavil should not “detract from the important portrait Lamster provides of a major artistic master at a time when artists were still fully integrated into the intellectual, social and political affairs of their time.”

I should note also that the book recently received a generous review in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

This is a good week to be thankful, and I am especially grateful to everyone who made the launch of De meester van de schaduw in Antwerp such a success. Pub day itself began with a formal launch at the Rubenshuis, presided over by director Ben van Beneden and Rubens scholar Leen Huet. Attendees, including some twenty Antwerpers who had won space in a lottery held by the Gazet van Antwerpen (the city’s major daily), then followed me on a tour of Rubens sites (the home of Nickolaas Rockox, the Cathedral), culminating with a champagne reception at City Hall. By tradition, we ended the day with a round of Bollekes at the Engel. A few links and images:

ATV’s segment on me and the book on the show Onder Cover.

A tour of Antwerp and interview with journalist Ann Rootveld for the Radio1 program Mezzo, “Special Agent Rubens.”

Some images from the day:

Top Row [l-r]:
-My appearance on ATV
-The festive crowd at the Rubenshuis
-The festive crowd at the Rubenshuis

Second Row:
-Leen Huet discusses Rubens and his career
-Departing Rubenshuis
-The tour heads to Rockox House

Third Row:
-Looking at the Descent at the Cathedral
-Reception at City Hall
-Erick Rinckhout, Toon van Mierlo, me, Hal Lamster

Fourth Row:
-Feature in De Tijd
-Feature in Gazet van Antwerpen
-Feature in De Morgen