print September 1996

Lilly Reich

Lilly Reich and Mies van der Rohe were collaborators, friends, and lovers from the mid ’20s to the advent of war in 1938, until Mies fled to the United States, eventually taking his place in the pantheon of Modernist heroes. Yet at the beginning, Reich was as much Mies’ leader as his follower. She had a roaring practice when they met: she was a member of the Werkbund board, an established clothing and textile designer who preached a reduced, Modernist esthetic, and an exhibition designer whose work was known abroad: her Werkbund show “The Applied Arts” was held at the Newark Museum in 1922.

print February 1996

Carlo Mollino

The celebrated architect and furniture designer Carlo Mollino coupled erotic imagery and an obsession with the machine in all his work, including his photography. He began taking Man Ray–inspired pictures of women in the ’30s, and by the ’60s, Polaroids of prostitutes had become the primary means through which the middle-aged Mollino bluntly fetishized the female form.

The earlier, larger photographs seem almost innocent, if clichéd: an image of a woman’s head, gently balanced alongside a glass box, or a streamlined profile, a nose stretched forward like the prow of a plane with a plunging Alpine

print December 1995

Nicolai Ouroussoff

☝ CITY OF SOUND

In Paris, the broad strategy of city planners during the years of François Mitterrand’s Grand Travaux was simple: new cultural landmarks would be erected in the working-class sectors to give instant stature to suffering communities. The results have been mixed. But Christian de Portzamparc’s CITÉ DE LA MUSIQUE, completed in February, is a triumph of architecture that strives to reach beyond its own walls. It is a monumental structure seemingly cut apart in order to draw the city into itself.

Sited at the entrance of the Parc de la Villette—once home to Victor Baltard’s iron-framed

print December 1995

Greg Lynn

It is a polarity that has governed our vision of the future for decades: either the computer age is embraced as the harbinger of an era of unprecedented comfort or as the augur of a technological wasteland. In Greg Lynn’s version, the computer will blissfully alter the spaces we inhabit. Unfortunately, if his recent show is any indication, the form this architectural innovation will take is so detached from the physical world as to be completely sterile.

Tucked away snugly in a corner of the gallery, the asymmetrical Mylar panels that formed the curved walls of Lynn’s installation were molded

print February 1995

URBAN FLIGHT: ZAHA HADID’S MODERN CITIES

ZAHA HADID WANTS TO MAKE buildings fly. Seemingly obsessed with images of lightness, with fantasies of buildings frozen as they explode into fragments, she has long fought the laws of gravity. Gravity has won. Now Hadid’s “deconstructivist” architecture—an expressionistic blend of fragmented forms inspired by Soviet Constructivism and vague notions of disorder—has a center that holds. And this London-based architect’s work has undergone a delicate transformation: from abstracted drawings of buildings that float and slip across the paper to concrete projects more deeply anchored in the realm of