What I saw at Javits: A CNC router carving small wooden cars (top), 3D printers spewing tcatchkes (center), and a built-in countertop espresso gizmo emitting cappuccino through a faucet.

Another year, another furniture fair.  It was the 25th anniversary edition of the International Contemporary Furniture Fair at the Javits Center in New York.  Every year I go and attempt to assess the state of the world by looking at sofas, chaises, coffee tables and wall coverings.  The past couple of years were a little dull; the world, I decided, was in a holding pattern. (Here’s 2012 and 2009) This year, however, I detected an exuberance that I hadn’t sensed in quite sometime.

The funny thing is that the upswing in mood had very little to do with the actual furniture on display.  Yes, there were some cool pieces including new turntable consoles for the vinyl revival by Symbol, reissued Josef Albers nesting tables from AMEICO, and some great looking Konstantin Grcic chairs by Emeco.  But the big excitement had to do with fabrication.   It’s one thing for digital fabrication to be on display at the reliably outre New Museum, and another for it to turn up much closer to the mainstream at Javits; clearly the maker movement has arrived.

Most impressive was a cluster of several machines dead center on the exhibition floor, laser cutting and folding steel into Tom Dixon designed Punch Balls.  Trumpf, a German manufacturer of high tech industrial equipment was in charge, assisted by Red Hook based metal shop Kanmetal.  More than the tabletop sized 3D printers that were seemingly everywhere, spewing out fragile looking tchatchkes, Dixon’s metalworks struck me as a  large,  loud statement about the  very nowish merger of design and manufacturing.

Then there was the huge CNC router set up in the middle of Javits North, an underpopulated annex, carving blocks of wood into smallish cars.  I was too tired by the time  I got there to figure who was fabricating what and why,  but it was also a fairly dramatic operation.

And there was my favorite thing, the very indulgent built-in espresso system called TopBrewer.  The machine (including a grinder) was built in to a counter, controlled by an iPad app, and delivered hot cappuccino out of  a faucet.   I’ve made endless  jokes about my desire for an app that makes espresso.  The set-up I saw at Javits comes very close to my fantasy and nicely represents a whole other spin on the concept digital fabrication.

The American Folk Art Museum, October 2007.

Above is my one not-very-successful attempt to photograph the American Folk Art Museum on 53rd St., designed by Tod Williams and Billie Tsien.  It opened to great acclaim in 2001 and was sold by its financially distressed owner in 2011 to the big museum next door.  Which, of course, was the beginning of the end.

I took the picture in 2007, while writing a mini-guide to my favorite buildings in midtown.  I divided the buildings into the “fat” ones — Grand Central and the New York Public Library at Fifth Ave. and 42nd St. — and the “thin” ones: Christian de Portzamparc’s  LVMH tower on 57th St., Raimund Abraham’s Austrian Cultural Forum on 52nd St. and the American Folk Art Museum.  To me, the thin buildings are especially appealing because, unlike the mammoth skyscrapers that are Manhattan’s signature  feature, they are significant works of architecture built at townhouse scale.  These skinny midblock masterpieces play a vital role in keeping midtown visually exciting.  They make for a variegated streetscape and act as barriers against encroaching homogeneity.

Shortly after the American Folk Art Museum sold its building to MoMA, I had a conversation with Tsien.   She reasoned that, since MoMA collects and displays architecture, it should simply add the Folk Art to its collection, preserve it and keep it, perhaps using it as an exhibition or event space.

I thought it was a lovely idea, but I didn’t believe it was going to happen.  Indeed,  MoMA has just announced its intention to demolish the smaller museum before the end of the year.  I’m not surprised.  The kind of building that Williams and Tsien designed, quirky and modest, with a facade that appears hand-crafted and circuitous exhibition space that transformed each visit into a treasure hunt, is not MoMA’s kind of building.  It doesn’t feature vast white-walled galleries or a cavernous atrium.  It doesn’t telegraph self importance or celebrate a doctrinaire brand of Modernism.  It is decidedly unglassy.

The American Folk Art Museum is antithetical to MoMA overdeveloped self-image and stands in the way of its seemingly endless expansion plans.  That’s why it’s going down.  And that’s exactly why MoMA should be wise enough to keep it. The difference between Williams and Tsien’s approach to Modernism and MoMA’s is the kind of aesthetic divide that a truly great museum would be big enough to engage and creative enough to exploit.  That MoMA will undermine New York City’s zoning in the name of important architecture to build it’s cherished Jean Nouvel tower, but can’t find a way to preserve a far less remunerative work of important architecture, speaks volumes about the museum’s priorities.

The Edible Schoolyard, Berkeley, CA 2007 (photo by Karrie Jacobs)

At last week’s memorial for Bill Moggridge, who died in September, I began thinking about the places where his  life intersected with mine, moments I’d almost forgotten.    Bill was an industrial designer, famous for designing the first portable computer back in 1979.  He was one of the founders of the well-known Palo Alto design firm IDEO, where he did his best to inject humanity into the concept of human factors.  in the last years of his life lived in New York and served as the director of the Cooper Hewitt Museum.

As I listened to those on stage at Symphony Space  — including Bill’s longtime business partner at IDEO, David Kelley, design curator Ellen Lupton, and Microsoft researcher Bill Buxton – I was thinking about how oddly pivotal Bill was in my own  life.  I met him in 1989, when I was invited to speak at the Stanford Design Conference.  Bill was, quite literally, the welcoming committee.   On the morning of my talk — the first of the conference — he arrived at my hotel on foot and walked me to the Stanford campus.  During my talk, he sat in the front row and laughed conspicuously at all my jokes.  I don’t know whether that was his job as host, or whether he was genuinely amused.  Either way, he put me at ease and made me feel tremendously welcome.  By the end of the conference, I decided that Bill, although he was born in England, represented something enviably Californian: the Happy Intellectual.

Much later , in spring of 2002, I drove down to the house Bill and his wife Karin had built into a west-facing ridge, with an unbroken view of the Pacific, somewhere south of San Francisco. By then, I was doing my best to be a Californian.  The Moggridges were having a party and had  invited me.  But I was also there to see the house.  I was the editor of Dwell back then and the house was, no surprise,  perfect for the magazine.   It was also a delightful party.  Smart, interesting people.  Good food and drink.   I drove home in my VW convertible, enjoying a profound sense of well-being, top down and  seat heater on.  I was cruising along the top of the ridge and, just below the level of the road, hung a layer of fog that had rolled in from the ocean.  I drove north,  listening to music, and feeling as though I was piloting an airplane above the clouds.

I constructed an issue around Bill and Karin’s house.  Their architects (Baum Thornley) had taken great care to respect the geology of the surrounding ridge.  The proposal included not just renderings, but little test tubes of soil samples.  The issue would be about houses and the landscape.  It would also feature a home on Vancouver Island that incorporated the property’s boulders as part of the interior, and a house in Montana that the architect believed would somehow reduce sprawl.   Unaccountably, the issue’s theme — the landscape — triggered an in-house conflict at Dwell.  It was the last in a series of disputes, the one that convinced me that my own California experience  was just about over. Clearly  I wasn’t cut out for the Happy Intellectual lifestyle.

I’m pretty sure I never told Bill about how his house — indirectly, unpredictably — triggered my departure from Dwell. In fact, I  hadn’t really thought about that connection until I was listening to the Memorial panelists reminisce.  The Memorial also made me recall one other Bill moment that I’d completely forgotten:  Sometime in the early 2000s, in the driveway of Michael and Katherine McCoy’s house in Buena Vista, Colorado, Bill was one of a trio of America’s leading industrial designers who helped reattach a rear-view mirror that I’d snapped off my rented Mustang.  As I recall, they did a splendid job, nearly invisible, using ingenuity and electricians’ tape.  I’d like to think that the all-star customization job added to the car’s value, but I neglected to mention it to the rental agency in question.

Anyway, I just noticed that there’s a website that’s collecting Bill Moggridge stories. Do take a look: http://www.billmoggridge.com/celebration/

Ada Louise Huxtable, 1974, photographed for Life by Alfred Eisenstaedt. (Photo poached from the Dwell website.)

I was sad to read in this morning’s New York Times that the newspaper’s first — and best — architecture critic, Ada Louise Huxtable,  has died at age 91.

My favorite article of hers, “The Park Avenue School of Architecture,”  was published in the Sunday Times Magazine on December 15, 1957.  She wasn’t yet on staff,  but was working at the Museum of Modern Art and writing an invaluable little book, Four Walking Tours of Modern Architecture in New York City, jointly published in 1961 by MoMA and the Municipal Art Society.

In the article, she explains to a dubious public the value of the glassy new office towers that had recently  sprouted along Park Avenue, like Lever House and the Seagram Building.  She was writing when those buildings were still viewed as experiments or as outrages.   I like to have my SVA design criticism students read the article and then follow Huxtable’s walking tour of Park Avenue.  The goal is to get them to see the blocks between 42nd and 59th Streets, through her eyes,  as if it were 1961 and glass curtain-walled office buildings were  still controversial.  The idea is to get them to see a stretch that now seems entirely predictable as it was when it was  borderline unthinkable.

In 1957, Huxtable wrote:

“For we no longer just bury the past; we destroy it to make room for the future.  Monuments and memories are demolished with the same cheerful, irreverent violence.  As the old buildings disappear radical new ones rise immediately in their place and the pattern of progress becomes clear: business palaces replace private palaces; soap aristocracy supplants social aristocracy; sleek towers of steel-framed blue, green, or gray tinted glass give the avenue a glamorous and glittering new look.”

Well, social aristocracy has made a comeback since she wrote those words with landmark office towers transformed into luxury condos, but Huxtable’s lucid approach to architecture criticism never changed and she  never stopped writing. In recent years, she’s been the architecture critic of the Wall Street Journal. Check out what she had to say about Libeskind’s winning plan for Ground Zero or her recent take on the New York Public Library’s planned overhaul.

Oh, and you can get the 1957 Park Avenue article from the Times website (as a PDF).  Dig it out of the archives and go for a walk.  Honor the memory of Ada Louise Huxtable by spending a few hours seeing a familiar part of the city through her wonderfully fresh eyes.

Special effects from the Who concert (top) made more special by the limitations of my iPhone camera. And (directly above) the non-iconic backside of the Barclays Center just before opening day.

It gets worse.  Not only did I write kind words about Barclays Center, the rust-coated basketball arena that is the first building to go up in the much despised Atlantic Yards complex, but I actually went to a show there.  Last night.

I’d never seen the Who in concert.  If I was ever going to see them, I should have done so 40 years ago, when I cared, when Baba O’Riley was the best song ever.  But I never did.  A couple of years ago, Ed and I watched the band’s halftime performance during the Superbowl and it was so sad.  An elderly Pete Townshend still windmilling.  An over-the-hill Roger Daltrey still preening.  Both of them singing  anthems of  youth without conviction, no longer able to hit the high notes.

But someone bought Ed tickets to see the Who. So we went.  They were performing the album Quadrophenia (1973) in its entirety, an album I’d always liked.  And the show was better than expected largely because of the visuals.  I realize that I haven’t been to an arena rock concert in decades and that the visual component has really taken off.  The Who used four screens, one a large backdrop and the others overhead and shaped like cameos, to show historical footage of England in the post-war years, of Mods and Rockers, of the ocean, and of the Who themselves much, much younger (and in the cases of Keith Moon and John Entwistle, still alive). They had the good sense to use documentary footage to transform a rock opera about youth culture being sung by men in their late sixties (for an audience that was equally gray) into a meditation on the passage of time.

The other thing is that Barclays Center turns out to be a decent place to see a show.   They had crossing guards out front helping concert goers to navigate Flatbush and Atlantic Avenues.  The arena staff was competent and welcoming.  The brisket sandwich I had from the arena branch of Fatty’Cue was tasty.  And it was an easy subway ride home.

Which brings me to my latest Metropolis column, my review of the arena’s architecture in the context of the overall Atlantic Yards project.  The thrust of the article was that, while the arena is much better than anticipated, the project as a whole is still utterly misbegotten.  My suggestion was that SHoP, the  architects responsible for the  look of Barclays apply their talents to redoing the project’s masterplan.  Seems like a logical move to me.  But I couldn’t get any response from SHoP to my questions about whether this was in the realm of possibility.  However, a Nets website that picked up on my review of the arena said this:

Jacobs asks if SHoP can get its hands on the master plan for the rest of the site. In fact, it has and is working on re-shaping the original master plan laid out by Frank Gehry.

To which I can only respond: Hmmmm.

Robert Ryman?  Agnes Martin?  Kazimir Malevich?  (Photo by Karrie Jacobs.)

Last night I took my SVA DCrit students on our annual field trip to Times Square.  We started with a tour that featured the Marriott Marquis in all it’s bunkerish glory, and attempted to visit the Philippe Starck designed lobby of the Paramount Hotel, only to discover that the lobby was closed for renovation (strongly suggesting that, as with the Royalton, another 1980s Starck landmark has bit the dust).  And then we sat, as we always do, on the TKTS Booth bleachers, observing the multimedia extravaganza all around us and trying to decide what John Ruskin would say if he were here.  Fun.

At some point, I asked my students what Times Square would look like without all the signage.  What kind of place would be left if all the screens suddenly went dark?  I don’t think anyone had a great answer.  But then, as I was walking back to the subway, I looked up and saw the SOM-designed office tower on the south side of 42nd Street covered in blank billboards.  It’s probably just the prep work for a big ad campaign to come, but I chose to see it as a work of minimalist public art.  Maybe it was a Robert Ryman retrospective.

Also, while I was standing on 42nd St. waiting for my students to gather, I was watching the hustlers dressed in Micky and Minnie Mouse costumes who, like the notorious Elmo, are posing for pictures with tourists in exchange for tips.  I don’t think that anyone, back when we were all fuming about the Disneyfication of Times Square, could have envisioned this particular scenario.

Tidbits:

Here’s a recent Metropolis column on my new neighborhood.

And here’s my current favorite video.

Oh, and if you happen to be in St. Louis on the 28th of this month, I’ll be speaking at the FORM Contemporary Design Show.

Bodega, Havemeyer St., Williamsburg, Brooklyn

Everything is organic here.

The view from inside the Wythe Hotel’s rooftop bar, and the scene on the street below.

I moved.  Again.  Crazy, right?

Early last year, I relocated from downtown Brooklyn to Soho, to live with my  boyfriend.  Then, two weeks ago, the BF, the dog, and I picked up and moved to Williamsburg.  So I’m back in Brooklyn.  But it’s a completely different part of the borough.  W’burg has none of that dreary workaday quality that dominates Downtown with its government offices and courts.  Williamsburg is built (or rebuilt) for pleasure.  Good food.  Good drink. Good hanging out.  It’s all candy here.   The place feels more like San Francisco than New York City.

Last night, after dinner in a Mexican restaurant down by the increasingly glamorous East River, the BF and I were strolling up Wythe and came upon the new Wythe Hotel.  We noticed people on a rooftop terrace, so we went up and checked it out.  It turns out that the Wythe, developed by Andrew Tarlow, the owner of Diner, one of W’burg’s original hipster destination restaurants, has a glorious rooftop bar with the most expansive north-to-south Manhattan skyline view I’ve ever seen.   Best sunset ever.  And, so far,  it doesn’t bother me at all that Manhattan is over there and I’m over here.

A couple of links to recent Metropolis columns:

Dallas

http://www.metropolismag.com/story/20120608/instant-urbanism

MoMA’s Foreclosed exhibition

http://www.metropolismag.com/story/20120511/pretty-little-pictures

Atlantic City

http://www.metropolismag.com/story/20120413/repriming-the-pump

Pleated paper interior by Molo Design, Ltd.  (Photo by Karrie Jacobs.)

Yeah.  I know. It’s been a while.

I love to blog, but it’s something I generally do first thing in the morning and lately my mornings have been monopolized by Memphis, a very handsome, demanding, cattle-dog mix.  And this week we — the boyfriend, the dog, and I — are about to move from Soho to Williamsburg.

But I took a break from packing to check out ICFF at Javits, just to see whether anything was happening that required my attention.  Not a whole lot is.  It’s one of those transitional years.  The Modernist revival that began in the mid-1990s is winding down.  The explosion of green product that boomed  a few years ago has slowed to a trickle.  The recent fascination with computer-driven intricacy is still around, but not as dominant as it has been in past years.  What’s new, if new is indeed the proper word, is the influx of retro-looking artisinal-feeling product: rough hewn wooden tables, hand cast metal tchatchkes… Oh, and Kohler is manufacturing brightly colored sinks (designed by Jonathan Adler) displayed in a booth made from a shipping container (a signal that the shipping container fad has finally crested).

Here are the standouts:

1. Peter Stathis, who brought his breakthrough LED task lamp, Link, to the fair in 2008, has started his own lighting company, Light & Contrast.  His star product at this year’s fair, the Trapeze,  is a major improvement on Link (which I still really admire), both in terms of sculptural qualities and the amount of light it sheds.

2. Matthew Hilton, a British designer who has worked for pretty much everyone, including himself, is lately allied  with De La Espada.  While I have mixed emotions about the revival of wood as a  fashionable material, Hilton does it right.  He is, at heart, a minimalist, who never does anything that could be described as rough hewn.

3. My favorite large scale object at the fair was the pleated paper booth (see above) by Molo Design, Ltd., a Vancouver B.C. based architecture and design studio.  In furniture fairs past, I’ve noticed eye-catching temporary structures that turned out to be completely unrelated to the products on display within.  In this case, Molo’s booth is also its product.  Very cool.

4. Other good stuff:  LED lamps by QisDesign.  Claesson Koivisto Rune -designed Air purifiers by Blueair.  (Which don’t seem to be on the company’s US website.) Student design from the University of Lapland. A nice  Antonio Citterio comfy chair from Vitra.

After the move, I’m going to try to be a better blogger.  Even though blogging is over.  Especially because blogging is over.

The Westin hotel  (top) at The Domain in Austin with the sign that inspired my current Metropolis column and (bottom) a view of SOL Austin from the development’s first two-story house.

I went to Austin in October to report a story for the New York Times “Home Section” that finally, finally,  ran in today’s paper.  And wound up staying in an Aloft hotel in the far northwest corner of the city, part of a development called the Domain.  So I got two things out of one trip, the Times story about SOL, an architecturally ambitious green subdivision, and a Metropolis column about The Domain and how the meaning of the word “urban” is changing.

Thinking about it now, I realize that both pieces tell roughly the same story, about how American cities and our ideas about what constitutes an urban place are changing as we move deeper into the 21st Century.  Developments are beginning to appear that are convincingly of this century, as opposed to being reheated 20th century concepts of what the future was supposed to look like.