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It’s been a tough stretch for muscular, brooding architecture. Last week, Raimund Abraham, the uncompromising architect of New York’s Austrian Cultural Forum was killed in an automotive accident. This week, Bruce Graham, the SOM partner who collaborated with engineer Fazlur Kahn on the Sears and Hancock towers in Chicago, passed away. “Big John,” as the Hancock was called, was their best work, a tapered, hundred-story condo tower, with the X-braces of its “trussed tube” structure laid plainly bare on its facades. It is dark and imposing from the outside and comfortably modern within. (So, kind of like Chicago.) It has long been one of the city’s best addresses, considered as such from the moment it opened, advertising the “world’s highest residences.” A few years ago I edited a book on the building, with photographs by Ezra Stoller and an introduction by Kahn’s daughter, the architectural historian Yasmin Sabina Kahn. One favorite anecdote: the architect and engineer tested human response to the building’s slight sway at a Maytag “Tale of the Tub” washing machine installation at the Chicago Museum of Science. A nice story for a sad day.

Herbert Muschamp often griped that New York was allergic to “serious architecture,” a refrain frequently aped by his successor, Nicolai Ourousoff. This was and is both unfair and inaccurate, and one of the buildings that demonstrates as much is Raimund Abraham’s 2002 Austrian Cultural Forum, which opened in 2002. Only 25 feet wide, it slices down from the sky, a kind of Easter Island guillotine. It’s a great building, a building with a spine [both literal and figurative], and a series of controlled, smartly crafted spaces. Abraham was killed earlier this week in a Los Angeles car accident, awful news. He had just given a lecture at Sci-Arc. A loss for architecture.

My interview with Francesca Rheannon of NPR’s Writer’s Voice is now online. If you’ve got some free time, hear us gab about Rubens and diplomacy.

When does inspiration cross over the line into plagiarism and copyright infringement? This is the subject of my lede story for this Sunday’s Los Angeles Times Calendar/Arts section, which looks at the work of photographers Sze Tsung Leong [above, top row] and David Burdeny [above, bottom row]. Photography poses special problems in the realm of fair use, because as a medium it is predicated on reproduction, and because it is so widely and easily practiced. As I write in the story, “some form of transformation of an original work is required to avoid infringement, but just what constitutes an acceptable level of transformation is a matter of interpretation.”

[left: Leong installation; right: Burdeny installation]

The Leong-Burdeny case is especially tricky, though I think the fact that Burdeny has borrowed not just photographic subject matter but also installation style and texts from Leong is telling. As the story mentions, there are also images in Burdeny’s show at Vancouver’s Kostuik gallery that closely approximate images taken by the German photographers Elger Esser and Andreas Gursky. Although I did not have the opportunity to mention it in the short space of the article, Burdeny has in the past also produced images of similarity to other photographers:

Continue reading Double Vision: Did David Burdeny Copy Sze Tsung Leong?

There’s been no more contentious subject in the art world over the last decade than the status of the Barnes Foundation, and its decision to forsake its suburban home for a new museum on Philly’s Benjamin Franklin Parkway. The controversy is the subject of a new film by Don Argott, The Art of the Steal, which I review in the latest issue of the Architect’s Newspaper. I’m admittedly somewhat agnostic on the fate of the Barnes, though I think Argott is a rather poor man’s Michael Moore. (Irony, given Barnes’s wealth.) I think my attitude reflects a general feeling of my peer group in the museum world. When I asked a curator friend what she thought of the situation, her bemused response was: “Barnes was a mean old bastard and cursed the whole place for all eternity?” The cursed place will soon have a new home designed by Tod Williams and Billie Tsien [above]. So, as I write in the story, not exactly a tragic ending.

My stab at narrative travel journalism (mixed with a review of the new CityCenter complex in Las Vegas) is now live on DesignObserver. Check it out if you’ve got a couple of minutes, and please leave a comment if you’re of the mind to do so. Also, for those interested, there are some supplemental images here.

Back in my old life as an editor at Princeton Architectural Press, I had the great pleasure of editing (and designing) the Architecture of Diplomacy, which remains the definitive history of the American embassy building program. The high-water mark of that program came during the Cold War era, when a series of high-profile modernist buildings were commissioned around the globe, designs that spoke of America’s democratic openness and progressive ideals. One of the most prominent of those was Eero Saarinen’s London embassy building, though it took its lumps at the time. British critics thought it, alternately and paradoxically, too bombastic and too restrained. Saarinen wasn’t a critical darling at home either: the apparent diversity of his practice was derided as “style for the job” design. Saarinen’s legacy is a bit more secure these days, and deservedly so. There was no more gifted architect at integrating technological innovation with bureaucratic necessity and sharp aesthetics, and it’s that combination that made the London embassy a success.
Continue reading London Calling

I have a piece out in the new issue of Dwell, a peek at a modest kitchen reno in Brooklyn. It’s not online yet. I presume it will be soon, and shortly after that, I suspect it will be repurposed on everyone’s favorite new site, unhappyhipsters, where Dwell’s images are recaptioned to comic effect. Modernism is such a downer! Ha! The site’s brilliant, and I will admit I thought it hilarious the first 87 times I clicked over. I’m sure there will be a book. I will say, however, that the gag is starting to wear thin at this point. Okay. We all get it. The other day, the lovely, self-designed home of my friends Daniel and Annie Mihalyo got the treatment. No harm. To me, the funniest thing about this is that Daniel is the most innately good natured person walking this earth. I don’t think he could be unhappy if he tried—and he’s not particularly hip either.

This brings me to the small flurry of comments on my recent piece on Design Observer, a review of a new monograph by 2×4. I think the piece stands for itself, so haven’t entered this fray (and will not do so here), but I did want to respond to a line of argument that seems endemic to negative comments on that site, and elsewhere. To wit, anytime a reader finds a piece of writing they don’t like, it’s not just a piece of writing they don’t like, but a sign of The End of Design Writing. That is, that “Design Writing”—as if there could be such a monolithic thing—has somehow fallen from some high state of art, and that the economic troubles of the design publishing business is the deserved come-upance for this state of affairs (as opposed to the economic meltdown and poor management). This is batshit crazy. This is the Golden Era of Design Writing. There are so many good design writers practicing I can hardly keep track of them. It’s almost depressing; I don’t have time to read all of their work. We even have a graduate program in design writing pumping new talent into this system. Yes, it’s sad that we’ve lost a few magazines, and that it’s harder than ever to eek out a living in this business. But still, from a consumption standpoint, there is more good work available than ever before. Anyway, I’m all for complaining—hell, I’m a record-setting complainer. But, please, let’s all get a bit of perspective.

I’m pleased to announce that I’ve joined the distinguished slate of contributing editors to Design Observer, what I consider to be the premier site on the web for writing on design in its many disciplines. My first piece in this capacity, a review of It is What It Is, a new monograph/catalog by the design firm 2×4, is now live. Coming up next is a look at CityCenter, the enormous new complex on the Las Vegas Strip featuring Daniel Libeskind’s “Crystals” shopping center [above]. It’s an honor to be on the D.O. team, and with ID gone, it’s nice to have a new home.

The J-E-T-S are out of the playoffs following a valiant effort yesterday afternoon. That’s not a shocker, though their appearance in the AFC Championship Game certainly was surprising. Deserved credit went to the defensive schemes of head coach Rex Ryan, stellar play by DB Darrell Revis, and the smart decision-making of rookie QB Mark Sanchez. But maybe a game ball should also go to architect Roger Duffy of SOM. Duffy and his team designed the Jets’s state-of-the-art training facility in Florham Park, NJ, which opened last year. It is a high-tech place invented to give the Jets every conceivable advantage over their opponents. Temperature controls allow them to simulate any game condition. Anti-microbial materials and hand-washing stations keep the expensive workforce in good health. The entire place is designed down to the inch with every high tech accessory the coaching staff and players might need or want. It’s the NASA of football facilities. I reviewed it for ID last year.