e x h i b i t i o n s

[Wheel People: Mobile Homes, Trailer Parks]

• irrepressible power
  "High-faluting architects have been slow to acknowledge the importance of the everyday dimension of the landscape ... Beethoven included peasant oom-pah-pah tunes in his symphonies, and realist painters didn't always depict aristocrats in Arcadia . . . This study of wheel people and trailer camps has a poignant, vitally human aspect that's lacking in so much architecture of our times." (Robert Venturi, in Rogers PD, wp_98.06.25)

• pride of place
  As affordable architecture, this works, says Venturi, "but there's this weird snobbery in this land of democracy." (Robert Venturi, in Rogers PD, wp_98.06.25)

 
[Building Culture Downtown: New Ways of Revitalizing the American City]
 
[New Jersey Performing Arts Center, Newark];   hEadlines

• a $10 word for mess
  "As the diva protested to the camera-toting tourist, 'We are not a building!' Darn right. And neither is the New Jersey Performing Arts Center.

  -- The lobby is a mess. ... The eye keeps taking refuge in details ..." (Muschamp H, nyt_97.10.17)

• buzz exists
  "So we used photographs of the building on all of our advertising materials, to show that it existed ..." (Barbara Eliran, the arts center's advertising agency. Pre-opening campaign marketing budgets estimated at least $500,000 - Collins G, nyt_97.10.24)

  
  

 

• martini-design
  "objects of extreme -- but expressive -- austerity: a chair made of the hide of just one cow; a soft polyurethane serving bowl that 'pours' into the tablecloth ... lumps of colored ice that have started to melt ... a condensation ..." (nyt_98.04.30)

• Droog-perfection
  "If Dutch design was about not being elegant, the work of Atelier Joep van Lieshout stood out for being ugly ... the importance of avoiding perfection in buildings." (Betsky A, nyt_98.04.30)

   
  

• citrus yellow
  "On LWS -- the sofa comes with a nickname ..." (Koncius J, wp_98.04.30)

 
[New Blood: 101]

• stiffly
  "to expose, reframe and validate emerging or reinvented design practitioners hidden from view by standard routes of power," (Bernard Zimmerman, organizer of the show, in Joseph Giovannini, nyt_98.04.03)

 
[Shiro Kuramata]

• forbid
  "To visit the Kuramata show is to realize that the world would be better place if it had never seen a tea kettle by Michael Graves. With each sale of a Richard Meier plate, civilization takes a small step backward. Homeowners show good sense when they encase their living room furniture in plastic slipcovers ... protect the young from all that design." (Mushamp H, nyt_98.03.19)

• more

d e -   b a i t

• more

[Women and the Making of the Modern House]

• ob-gyn
  "They had a common love -- the esthetics of freedom. And they had a common enemy -- the conventional house." (Hamilton WL, nyt_98.05.07)

• single, divorced, elderly
  "... If you're the sort of person who's defined your whole life against the odds, then you'll go the distance and hire an architect and design something extra
  ... it is a school for healthy risk." (nyt_98.05.07)

• cynical machinations
  "myriad procedural obstacles ... of all those who brought the project down: plodding bureaucrats, weak local media, rival architects (Manfredi Nicoletti, Norman Foster), and mediocre or uninterested politicians (Conservative ministers Michael Heseltine, John Redwood, and Virginia Bottomley)." (Ryan R, mm_98.03?)

• modicum attention
  "... he convincingly describes his growing affinity for her challenging and imaginative experiment, as opposed to those agreeable fantasies with which the populists beguile us, and of which those translucent impressions of the so-called Glass Wave of Manfredi Nicoletti are perfect examples." (Ryan R, mm_98.03?)

r e_c y c l e
f o r t h c o m i n g

[]

• more

Click BBZ to return to hEadlines