Friday, December 27, 2024
As I’ve done for the past few decades, I’m ending the year with a look back at some cultural highlights I found most fulfilling during the past 12 months: Hitting the road with the kids: 2024 was a special year for family travel — an early summer trip to stay with relatives in San Francisco (a moment from there above), then a late summer stay with my sister just outside of D.
From “I. M. Pei: Life Is Architecture,” a beautifully designed new volume by Shirley Surya and Aric Chen, a story of insistence driving invention:
Wary of the greenish tint characteristic of commercially available glass, Pei insisted on using a completely clear alternative for the Louvre’s pyramid. Along with President Mitterrand’s intervention, this led France’s largest glass manufacturer, Saint-Gobain, to devise an entirely new production process for large-scale manufacturing. Beginning by sourcing pure white sand from Fontainebleau, Saint-Gobain proceeded to develop a specialised furnace that reduces the amount of the naturally occurring iron oxide in the glass formula, eliminating the source of the green hue. The 675 diamond and 118 triangular panes were transported to a factory in the United Kingdom that was able to polish their surfaces to perfect planarity, achieving flawless results with optical properties close to those of crystal. (Photo)
Sunday, May 3, 2020
Odds and ends from the past few weeks: What a fun treat to see Forbes spotlight ListenForestPark.org, an audio microsite my team launched a few years ago as a side project. It’s found a new audience these days. Finished “Devs” on Hulu. Dug the style and performances; so-so on the ultimate substance. The series “ZeroZeroZero” was, like one of the creator’s prior work “Sicario,” cinematically beautiful; it was just too grim and violent for me to continue past episode three.Saturday, August 31, 2019
Loved this passage from Sam Jacob’s essay “Context as Destiny: The Eameses from Californian Dreams to the Californiafication of Everywhere,” published in the satisfyingly chunky The World of Charles and Ray Eames (2016): For architects and designers like [Peter and Alison Smithson, who were British], the Eameses’ Californian-ness opened a dazzlingly bright window into another world, a sun-kissed world far from the origins of European modernism weighed down by all that Old War baggage — by history, politics and war, by notions of an avant-garde, by post-war reconstruction and the serious politics of the welfare state.Saturday, December 10, 2016
Exciting news here in St. Louis: Studio Gang-designed residential tower to go up just east of Forest Park. Love knowing the architect from this 2014 New Yorker profile I enjoyed will be enriching my home city.Sunday, August 14, 2016
From Michael Auping’s Seven Interviews with Tadao Ando: The idea of a center is an interesting one, and one that is more of a Western concept. Roland Barthes made a comment on visiting Japan that it is a country that doesn’t seem to have a center; great depth, but no center. I think I carry that aspect of Japan with me. For me, the center of a building is always the person who is in it, experiencing the space from within it themselves.Saturday, May 7, 2016
Really enjoyed this book, which eschews icy, spacious luxury and celebrates lived-in warmth and often modest SQF. The choices on the first few pages (shown below) are representative of the book’s distinct point of view. (That kitchen towel is telling.) <div class=" image-block-outer-wrapper layout-caption-hidden design-layout-inline "> <figure class=" sqs-block-image-figure intrinsic " style="max-width:500px;"> <div style="padding-bottom:126.40000915527%;" class=" image-block-wrapper has-aspect-ratio "> <img src="http://sschenkenberg.files.wordpress.com/2016/05/eea1e-image-asset.jpeg" alt="" /><img class="thumb-image" alt="" /> </div> </figure> </div> <div class=" image-block-outer-wrapper layout-caption-hidden design-layout-inline "> <figure class=" sqs-block-image-figure intrinsic " style="max-width:500px;"> <div style="padding-bottom:133.Sunday, October 21, 2012
From a profile of the architect in ArtNews’ 09/12 issue: There’s the neutral white box. We see that, if you take that too far, it sucks the light out of art. Then there’s the super-expressionist building by the signature architect. But if you take that too far, it totally squashes the art, so you can’t have a great feeling for any art experience in a building like that. And we believe there is a third way, where the sense of space in which you’re going to experience the art is silent and poetic, but when you move from one gallery to another you’re engaged by the sequence.Wednesday, February 22, 2012
My post for the “Artful Travels” series at the TOKY Blog.