designobserver-blog reblogged
Submitted by rachtan.
Reasons Not to Be Pretty: Symposium on Design, Social Change and the “Museum”
In April 2010, participants from cultural and educational institutions in 11 countries met at Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center to discuss the museum’s potential role in relation to design for social change. Here, a report on this symposium sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation and organized by Winterhouse Institute.
http://changeobserver.designobserver.com/entry.html?entry=14748
New Fuel for an Old Narrative: Notes on the BP Oil Disaster
By Richard Campanella The consequences of the worst oil spill in U.S. history, which began on April 20 when the offshore BP Deepwater Horizon rig exploded, are still being reported and researched, and will unfold for years to come. Tulane University geographer Richard Campanella recalls a long hot summer, and he puts this latest disaster into the broader cultural and environmental contexts of New Orleans and the Gulf of Mexico, describing a complex history of third coast exceptionalism, of a city and region that are paying a disproportionate price for the nation's hunger for oil.
Source: places.designobserver.com
designobserver-blog reblogged
Lunch with the Critics: Park51 and 15 Penn Plaza
Quick post to say that the transcript of my second critical lunch with Mark Lamster, in the creepy climes of the Hotel Pennsylvania, has been posted on Design Observer. We discuss the urbanism, politics and skyline posturing of Park51 and 15 Penn Plaza.
A sample:
AL: The rendering of 15 Penn Plaza that really flabbergasted me was the one showing it in context — the context of a built-out Hudson Yards, remodeled Madison Square Garden, opened Moynihan Station. Are we still believing all of that? Sure, 15 Penn Plaza doesn’t look so big then, but that’s hardly justification for approving it now. Are all those people in Hudson Yards really going to use their one measly subway station, or are they too going to troop over to 34th Street and Seventh and Eighth Avenues? It is a rendering both sneaky and mean: sneaky because it makes millions of square feet for which no one can currently pay look like a fait accompli, and mean because it shows their tower will be better located than the ones rival Related Companies might build on the west side.
And, who needs any of this when there are half-empty office towers on the corner of 42nd and Eighth, and a little thing called One World Trade downtown? ML: My chief hope is that Hudson Yards doesn’t become another Riverside South — that is, another architecturally uninspired mega-development largely divorced from the city around it. But what scares me about the rendering you mention is how puny it makes the beast that is One Penn Plaza appear. That thing is an absolute monster. But the truth is, as much as we’re picking on Vornado, I don’t really blame them for exploiting the rules and, in fact, taking some positive step in terms of mass transit. They’re developers, after all. And Rafael Pelli talks a good game. It’s always entertaining to follow along as he so eloquently explains how his massive commercial projects are actually environmentally sensitive enhancements to the cityscape. Certainly, I won’t be mourning the loss of the Hotel Pennsylvania, one of the seediest hives in the five boroughs. I didn’t realize it was a McKim, Mead & White production until you’d mentioned it. Lord knows that if any one of that triumvirate came back to see what was living on in their name — not to mention the crime across the street where their great station once stood — they’d Howard Roark the thing into oblivion.
Read the rest here. Note scary rendering of future enormous midtown west above.
designobserver-blog reblogged
In the pantheon of taboo subjects, none is more difficult to address (or more potently visual) than obesity. It’s at once a stark reality and a cautionary tale, associated with serious economic consequences and no shortage of health complications — yet remains, to many, pure fodder for comedic opportunism. From Fats Waller to Fatty Arbuckle, Chris Farley to John Candy to a host of self-anointed celebrities, the public at large has been groomed to laugh at fat people, many of whom claim that they can’t help being fat.
What do we talk about when we talk about fat?
(via Design Observer)
Part Two of Jessica’s series at Design Observer on obesity and anorexia.
designobserver-blog reblogged
In high school, I knew a girl who was so thin and so popular that I stopped eating. At 16, I thought that if I looked like her, I’d have more friends. My weight quickly plummeted down to 80 pounds: I looked like I was dying and I probably was. Soon, I found myself in a kind of disciplinary lockdown, eating meals under the watchful eye of our school nurse. All of which was seriously unpleasant — but eventually, I rallied.
Sadly, many do not. The mortality rate associated with anorexia nervosa is twelve times higher than the death rate of ALL causes of death for women between the ages of 12 and 35, giving it the highest mortality rate of any mental illness.
To the degree that body image lies at the core of this pathology, how can visual people not take notice?
(via The Real Skinny on the Real Skinny: Design Observer)
photo by Lauren Greenfield
Today is the 90th anniversary of the 19th Amendment, the right of women to vote. Fifteen years ago we were given the opportunity to celebrate this same date in the main waiting room at Grand Central Station in New York City. This is the typographic installation created by Drenttel Doyle Partners.
[Jessica Helfand: Reflections on Printmaking] Recently, I spent 10 days as artist-in-residence at The Center for Contemporary Printmaking in Norwalk, Conn., where I worked on a series of monotypes, drypoint etchings (and one extremely labor-intensive aquatint), trying to capture some of the momentum from my residency in Rome.
— William Drenttel
This brilliant project by Tom Scott creates labels that warn us of the pitfalls of "journalism."
— William Drenttel
The Art Directors Club announces its Hall of Fame laureates for 2010: creative director Fabien Baron; typographer Matthew Carter; the late illustrator and educator Philip Hays; photographer Brigitte Lacombe; design legend George Nelson; wunderkind Christoph Niemann; Wieden+Kennedy cofounder Dan Wieden; and, last but not least, our very own William Drenttel and Jessica Helfand. Congratulations to all!
— Michael Bierut
designobserver-blog reblogged
First I recognized that you were very clever
Eero Saarinen, list of Aline Bernstein’s good qualities, ca. 1954.
Aline and Eero Saarinen papers, 1857–1972. Archives of American Art. Smithsonian Institution
(via Lists: To-dos, Illustrated Inventories and Collected Thoughts: Design Observer)
Is Doing Good a Dirty Deed?
A recent essay on Fast Company's website by the editor, educator, and design commentator Bruce Nussbaum has brought a long-simmering debate about socially oriented design activities to a new froth. Architecture for Humanity's Cameron Sinclair responded with this post and recommended this one (an insider's critique of development efforts in Bangladesh). And now Nussbaum's chief target, Emily Pilloton of Project H, has launched her own rebuttal.
— Julie Lasky
designobserver-blog reblogged
This is a favorite intersection of ours: periodic tables and swearing. The next issue of Below the Fold: is going to be dedicated to swearing, so much so that it will be shipped in a brown (recycled) paper envelope. And Periodic Tables of the Elements — well, we have hundreds of them, and the subject keeps coming up on DOG. I'm buying this one as soon as it's back in print.
— William Drenttel
Source: Laughing Squid
The Creative Class: Do We Thrive in A Rural Setting?
"New research by economists David McGranahan and Timothy Wojan of the U.S. Department of Agriculture and Dayton Lambert of the University of Tennessee provides some new and important insights. Their study, entitled “The Rural Growth Trifecta: Outdoor Amenities, Creative Class and Entrepreneurial Context,” published in the July 2010 issue of the Journal of Economic Geography looks closely at the economic forces that are acting on rural areas and the local assets these areas can use to most effectively respond to these forces and spur development and prosperity. " Read "The Creative Class in Rural Areas."
— Jessica Helfand
Chinglish, Israeli-Style
Photographed in Israel by Lena Dunham. We have so many of these photos from Hong Kong, where the malapropism otherwise known as "Chinglish" is now a recognized cultural phenomenon. Personally, I can't get enough of this.
— Jessica Helfand
A New Column by the Editors of Design Observer
Design Observer started with a few blog posts that Jessica Helfand and I wrote and posted using Moveable Type. We used a stately default template in slate grey and dark green, if memory serves me right. Michael Bierut and Rick Poynor soon joined our enterprise, and we formally launched the site together in October 2003.
Today we are DOG — the Design Observer Group. We now have thousands of readers, numerous channels, seven editors, and publish over 300 essays a year. I've been spending a lot of time on Twitter, and we have 100,000 followers there. But our Observed column, an early and popular feature of Design Observer, has sort of gotten lost in the shuffle. Moreover, we are yearning for a space to write shorter items, experiment with new forms — something between the 2,000 word formal essay and the frustrating discipline of 140 characters.
So Observed is going to live here on Tumblr for a while. It's really going to be an editors column — shorter, more informal, maybe even occasionally fun. Over time you may see posts by my friends and peers: Michael Bierut, Jessica Helfand, Kyle Larkin, Julie Lasky, Nancy Levinson and Jade Snow-Carroll. We'll see where it goes. If it goes well, it'll probably end up back at Design Observer.
— William Drenttel