Tom Vanderbilt

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  print December 2004

  Tom Vanderbilt

  1 “The Snow Show” (Kemi and Rovaniemi, Finland) I would have used any excuse to visit the Finnish Lapland town of Rovaniemi, where Alvar Aalto’s stunning municipal buildings stand, but “The Snow Show,” curated by Lance Fung there and in Kemi, provided architecture of an even more native variety—ice and snow structures by Zaha Hadid, Tadao Ando, and others, their medium harvested from local lakes and engineered by Finnish master ice-builder Seppo Mäkinen. Part Fitzgeraldian winter carnival, part Smithsonesque exercise in entropic dissipation, the whimsy and beauty of these glacial constructions

• previews September 2004

  Design ≠ Art

  It has become almost rote to pronounce a blurring of the line between art and design. Artists who have dabbled in both disciplines have, however, felt the need to delineate boundaries.

  It has become almost rote to pronounce a blurring of the line between art and design. Artists who have dabbled in both disciplines have, however, felt the need to delineate boundaries. “The intent of art is different from that of [design], which must be functional,” Donald Judd said. “A work of art exists as itself, a chair exists as a chair itself.” The washroom sink that Judd designed for his home is on view here among sixty-nine functional objects by eighteen other luminaries of minimalist aesthetics, from John Chamberlain’s table made of car parts to Rachel Whiteread’s daybed formed from

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  books September 2004

  Rem Koolhaas

  THE IRONY OF Rem Koolhaas’s monumental 1995 S, M, L, XL was the relative paucity of the architect’s realized work in any of those sizes. The book had a mirror-world quality, as though the former journalist, waiting for the accrual of his reputation and for a favorable economy, were anticipatorily remaking the world in print (and blueprint). S, M, L, XL dwarfed the tomes of many a more-built architect. It’s as if the book were the building.

  Eight years on, Koolhaas’s Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) has found itself with an expanding global portfolio of built works, so it’s with a whiff

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  previews September 2004

  Massive Change: The Future of Global Design

  A good deal of this century’s design effort will, ironically, be directed at getting us out of the troubles we’ve designed ourselves into. Graphic-design maestro Bruce Mau has organized an exposition around the central question: “Now that we can do anything, what will we do?”

  A good deal of this century’s design effort will, ironically, be directed at getting us out of the troubles we’ve designed ourselves into. In the US, we’ve so rigorously designed physical labor out of our lives that obesity is now a top cause of preventable death. Graphic-design maestro Bruce Mau has organized an exposition around the central question: “Now that we can do anything, what will we do?” Melding objects, imagery, and even a radio program, he explores how we’ll have to adapt the world to the changing conditions to come. From the megacities of 2015 to inventor Dean Kamen’s “Stirling

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  print Summer 2004

  new-model flash mobs

  IN AN OBSCURE 1973 STORY titled “Flash Crowd,” the science-fiction writer Larry Niven describes how an argument at a shopping mall, which happened to be covered by a news crew, swells into a riot. The broadcast riot in turn attracts the attention of other people, who use the widely available technology of the teleportation booth to swarm first that event—thus intensifying the riot—and then other breaking events. One character in Niven’s story, articulating the police view, says, “We call them flash crowds, and we watch for them.”

  More than three decades later, in August 2003, at the Sawgrass

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  previews May 2004

  Airworld: Design and Architecture for Air Travel

  “Air travel reminds us who we are,” wrote Don DeLillo in The Names. “It’s the means by which we recognize ourselves as modern.” This show offers 394 objects (from advertisements and uniforms to cabin interiors and aircraft models) arranged by ticket office, terminal, departure, and arrival.

  “Air travel reminds us who we are,” wrote Don DeLillo in The Names. “It’s the means by which we recognize ourselves as modern.” Following World War I, most airports were mere sheds held over from military usage, but as the jet set emerged in the ’50s, the world’s leading designers—Robin Day, Alexander Girard, and Gio Ponti, to name a few—were enlisted to create an aura of efficiency and modernity. This show offers 394 objects (from advertisements and uniforms to cabin interiors and aircraft models) arranged by ticket office, terminal, departure, and arrival like some

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  print February 2004

  OPENINGS: EMILY JACIR

  On the wall of Emily Jacir’s studio in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn is a photograph roughly torn from a newspaper. Dominating the frame is a billboard featuring two men on horses, the text saying, simply, “Marlboro.” Below the billboard are stationed two tanks and helmeted soldiers at turrets. The photograph is of the West Bank. The streets are Palestinian. The tanks are Israeli. The billboard is ostensibly American, but it really belongs to that supranational agora of branding: Hovering over the grim reality on the ground, it is seemingly above borders, above politics, existing in some

• previews January 2004

  Marc Newson

  Sydney-born, London-based designer Marc Newson once estimated he spent at least one hundred days a year on airplanes. Small wonder, then, that his designs—soft, anthropomorphic, cocoonish—should so often sketch the seductive contours of a lost dreamworld of jet travel. From his rivet-dimpled Lockheed Lounge to his sleek, segmented Qantas Skybed seat to his new Eero Saarinen—inflected, honey-combed Lever House Restaurant interior, Newson rescues the luminous aeronautic future we almost had. Now he unveils Kelvin 40, a “concept jet” in anodized aluminum that also has

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  print December 2003

  Tom Vanderbilt

  TOM VANDERBILT

  1 Marko Home and Mika Taanila, eds., Futuro: Tomorrow’s House from Yesterday (Desura) Finnish architect Matti Suuronen’s pill-shaped Futuro went from helicopter-delivered fiberglass “after-ski cabin” to icon of the emergent, plastic-as-pornography space age. The “leisure house,” as the promotional literature would have it, was wrapped by Christo, posed in by Warhol, purposed as an Air Force recruitment station in California, and nearly bought en masse by the Soviet Union in a bid for cold-war cultural supremacy. The book, with its enclosed DVD documentary, is an elegiac postcard

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  interviews May 2003

  1000 WORDS: SIMON STARLING

  Born in Epsom, England, in 1967 and trained at the Glasgow School of Art, Simon Starling mingles the grand tradition of the British boffin, forever tinkering in the basement, with heady neo-Victorian science, re-creating lost histories and divining the invisible global traffic of everyday life. He plunges head-on into those nebulous topographies social scientists like to call the “space of flows,” casting abstracted labor into relief and putting commodity fetishism before the fun-house mirror: Starling has obtained balsa wood from Ecuador to make a model of a French Farman Mosquito airplane,