Voting For Design with Dollar Votes

Record-setting prices for the recent Sotheby’s auction of Important 20th Century Design brought the total take to $10.8 million, more than 10% above the total of high estimates for works by modernist icons such as Ron Arad, Edward Wormley and many others. 



A Greene & Greene chair from the living room of the Robert R. Blackwood House (seen above in a vintage image courtesy of Columbia University’s Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library) went for $913,000, a near-record for the Arts & Crafts designer brothers. 

Chez Spark’s own scribe attended the Contemporary Art auctions at Christie’s New York in Rockefeller Center recently and came away a convert.  Thrilling, spectacular and the farthest thing from the image of little old ladies timidly raising white paddles that came to mind when you read the first part of the sentence before this one.  Admit it – you almost yawned.  Don’t – get there any way you can. It’s the best free show around.  No, not as fun as Cirque du Soliel’s “Love”, but a heck of a lot cheaper.

Guys in Armani suits who never stopped talking on cell phones, Hong Kong buyers bidding up Jean Michael Basquiats, a phone bank that must be seen to be believed.  When a caller bids, the phone-banker shoots out the arm that isn’t holding the phone and screams “BIDDING!!!!!!” while an unflappable auctioneer fields competing bids from the floor, from the Internet, from the phone bank and from the house itself. 

Overhead, a giant flip board displays the current high bid in multiple world currencies like the train schedule in Bologna’s Central Station.  Some people have too much money, like the bidder who scored a B&W Warhol painting of the Heimlich maneuver poster.  (Don’t vote for irony with that many dollar votes.)


New World Heritage Sites to be Added, Some Already Designated Are Endangered



Forty-eight sites in 39 countries are being considered for World Heritage Site listing. Since 1972, the UNESCO-run program has given 830 precious cultural or natural sites the nod, including the Great Wall of China, the Pyramids, Timbuktu and Stonehenge. BBC News said the committee will also debate whether any existing sites are endangered by war, tourism, climate change, over-development or neglect.

Among the sites proposed for designation are icons such as Corfu, Sydney’s Opera House and the Bordeaux region. Others are less well-known, such as Teide National Park, Canary Islands, shown above.  Not all the candidates are willing.  The private owners of the Brussels Art Deco masterpiece, Palais Stoclet, are fighting to keep it, if not obscure, at least lower-profile.

In the named-but-not-secured category: The Tower of London may be overwhelmed by construction of an adjacent 1,016-foot skyscraper. Dresden may be marred by a controversial modern bridge. (Chez Spark loves modern bridges and they haven’t harmed the historic ambience of Boston or Rotterdam. Do we want to live in museum cities or thriving urban centers layered with structures from many eras?) Macchu Picchu might be too popular for its own good.


Conrad Black’s Lavish Lifestyle Puzzles Prosecutors

Okay, Chez Spark does have better things to do than slavishly follow the fraud trials of fallen capitalists who might be criminals.  But occasionally, design enters the picture – completely justifying time spent.

At the trial of Canadian media magnate Conrad Black, accused of using Hollinger company coffers to finance his lifestyle, the chief prosecutor would not even try to pronounce “guilloche” and confessed that he did not know what a barbiere was.  You’ll recall from those history of art classes that guilloche is a continuous scroll pattern of intertwined bands, sometimes featuring rosettes.  And who doesn’t know that a barbiere is a shaving stand?

Lord Black’s barbiere is a $12,500 mahogany number with a porcelain bottle, the former property of Napoleon, who used it during the Russian campaign.  LB spent $4.6 million in all to make his 4,500-square-foot loft livable.  Chez Spark finds the coverage in the Financial Times is the most entertaining, but if you haven’t been following the trial, catch up at all-Conrad, all the time web site, ConradBlackOnTrial.com.

Meanwhile, can somebody take up a collection to send that prosecutor back to art school or at least give him a pair of tickets to Il Barbiere di Siviglia? “Figaro, figaro, figaro…”

Zaha Hadid Teams with Chanel for Mobile Art Project

Starting now and continuing through 2010, Chanel will travel the world with its Mobile Art project, housed in a collapsible futuristic pavillion (above) designed by Zaha Hadid.  Women’s Wear Daily reports (June 12) that the “gleaming white UFO-like structure” will be filled with works by 15 contemporary artists, commissioned by Chanel to create homages inspired by its iconic handbag – quilted leather, chain handles and all.



Up to 2,000 people per day can visit the 7,500-square-foot pod with exhibition space of more than 6,000 square feet.  Hadid describes her design as a taurus with a defined loop through which visitors pass, exiting the same place they entered.

The show, designed to communicate the brand’s heritage in a new way, kicks off in Hong Kong next January, then travels to Tokyo, New York, LA, London, Moscow and Paris. In the immortal words of Chanel designer – and design maven – Karl Lagerfeld, “I think design and architecture are the real art today…Architecture and fashion are like Russian dolls.  One fits inside the other.”

Ciao for now, but stay tuned!
 

--CC

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Column Archive--Still good reading!

Of Course Food is Art

The choicest chocolate shops from Brussels to Barcelona feature on the terrific luxuryculture.com web site.  Click on City Guides – “Choctastic” will appear to drive you mad with chocolate craving. 



Several of Chez Spark’s pet chocolate shops are favored, including Pierre Marcolini’s boite on Place Grand Sablon in Brussels and Richart in midtown Manhattan, but there are some new-to-us gems as well, such as Amsterdam’s Puccini Bomboni which rated the dynamite dual descriptor “good/strange” on another travel website.
 

And the 2007 Pritzker Prize Goes to… Richard Rogers

You’ve read the news reports by now…but did you go to his web site to peruse his portfolio?  No worries – we did it for you and here’s the link: http://www.rsh-p.com
 

In addition to the project photos you’d expect to find, it also features terrific sketches, like the one above of the Ashford (UK) Designer Retail Outlets – a single-story anti-mall built on brownfield land with a high-tensile fabric roof, the antithesis of featureless American rigid-construction factory outlet malls. Yeah, okay, some critics are carping about Rogers’ showcase Madrid Barajas Airport project, but let’s take a look again in 10 years.  We’re betting it will still look spectacular.


Promises, Promises

It was weeks ago that we threatened to tell you about magazines to make your lobby look good and we’re finally getting around to it.  It’s a thrill to report that the first issue of our Monocle subscription just arrived. Gosh, I mean, wow.  It almost seems worth the staggering annual cost.

In our neck of the woods – and that’s no mere figure of speech, Chez Spark is nestled in a mid-continental backwater – we can’t buy Monocle on the newsstand.  As long-time admirers of Editor-in-Chief and Chairman Tyler Brûlé, we had to have it.  We’ve been experiencing withdrawal since his Fast Lane column ended its run in the Financial Times at the end of last year.
 


None of that is your concern.  Here’s what you need to know:  Monocle is National Geographic for a new generation of multi-media explorers with great graphics, good quality paper, dense with information. Only the cover is glossy.  Our new arrival, issue #2, April 2007, has a manga insert with story and art by Takanori Yasaka.
 
It will take longer to read this puppy than a double issue of The New Yorker.  Is the double truck “Panasonic X Monocle II” an advertorial?  It’s ambiguous, in any case. We snickered over the cultural essay about Identikit blondes on US television news.  You read about the new Roche HQ building in Basel here, first – but we didn’t have the dope on rival Novartis efforts to trump Roche in the architecture sweepstakes.

 
Other lobby-worthy periodicals:  the hefty, Hong Kong-based, WestEast Magazine of Style, Culture and Design has gorgeous graphics, oversized pages, and Kate Moss in all the ads.  Nope, here’s one for Gianfranco Ferre with Julia Roberts.  The masthead lists text and image contributors separately.  Matt cover, glossy editorial and ads.

 

Style over substance, certainly, but what style. Just sit quietly and let the images flip past as you turn the pages.  Its coverage of heritage luxury brands is less noxious than competing magazines’ thanks to the visual quality.  Glossy through and through and at $15, it’s 33% cheaper than Vogue Italia on the same themes.  (Find it at Borders; not to be confused with East West Magazine, an Asian-American lifestyle title.)
 

Matt paper is the new gloss or so one would suspect from a visual survey of the shelter-mag section.  Objekt International: Living in Style, a newish entrant to the category, is published quarterly in Amsterdam.  Issue #36 spotlights interiors, architecture, gardens, art, antiques and design – good thing it’s as hefty as W E.
 


Superb photography, layout and printing, with features on light and architecture, Tuscan art glass, French fashion bad-boy Jean-Charles de Castelbajac and much more – Objekt could give The World of Interiors a run for its money.  ($14.50 at Borders.)
 

I know what you’re thinking.  This woman is one of those people who has stacks of magazines and papers everywhere.  Well, you would be right, except I have a strict rule about the living room and the second floor.  My study is another story.  Life is meaningless without magazines.  Publishing is not dead, brothers and sisters, it’s only sleeping.  Sleeping in piles in my office and the den.

One of the biggest piles is the aforementioned World of Interiors.  I just can’t bring myself to throw or give any away.  (Unlike The Week which has the half-life of a pizza box.)  WOI is my number one recommendation for your lobby.  It’s a steal at $8.99 at Borders.
 


Compared to the titles above, it’s looking a little dated (I feel so disloyal giving voice to that last statement).  It’s nothing like Sunset Magazine, which ought to shuffle back to 1958.  Its contents are more imaginative, the writing fresher, the coverage more wide-ranging than anything you’ll read in a decade of Met Home or Elle Décor.

It’s glossy.  It’s frothy.  Truly international, its taste level is impeccable.  It’s by no means stuck in the English country house thing, although it covers them once in a while, if it gets a quirky candidate.  It scorns no design if the inspiration is worthy.

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Take That! Gherkin

Roche is reshaping Basel’s skyline with the construction of its new headquarters and Switzerland’s tallest building, a 40-story eye-catcher designed by Pritzker prizewinners Herzog & de Meuron. The project, which also includes a low-rise lab and research facility, is set for completion in 2011, and budgeted at $640 million. Roche is Switzerland’s second largest pharmaceutical company.


Speaking of the Gherkin

 Photography: Grant Smith

London’s modern landmark has been chronicled by filmmaker Mirjam von Arx. Building the Gherkin tells the story of the giant pickle – real name: 30 St. Mary Axe – built to be the Swiss Reinsurance Co.’s UK headquarters, designed by Foster & Partners. Von Arx records the design, construction and subsequent controversy over the 594-foot tall building in a 90-minute documentary (now available on DVD).


Keep Your McMansions Off My Dunes

Beloved by generations as the final repository for furniture too shabby to keep in the town house – too shabby even for the Shabby Chic clique – the beach shack is over, according to a new book, Beach Houses Down Under, by Stephen Crafti. The Sydney (Australia) Morning Herald quotes Crafti on the demise of beach shacks and their replacement, the beach monument, which “starts at 300 square metres” and is emphatically not “designed to be filled with muddy dogs and sandy kids trailing wet, salty towels”. Elizabeth Farrelly writes: “The new beach house is a masterpiece of design and architecture, says Crafti, complete with ensuites, air-con and guest wings, using sophisticated materials that reflect ‘a new aesthetic and lifestyle - a world of luxury and design, glamour and desire.’ The beach house argument, as Crafti puts it, is an economic one. Having paid through the nose for that piece of cliff or dune, the last thing you're going to do is put a shack on it.”


This Winner is a Real Corker


We like this contest almost as much as the Spark Awards. Make a chair out of a Champagne cork and cage for glory and honor from your peers.  Don’t miss the tour of most charming entries, coming soon to a DWR Studio near you – check the list here. Watch for next year’s contest around the first of 2008 – it’s a great excuse to drink Champagne. In fact, we’re headed for the ‘fridge right now.


Exhibits Worth a Detour

Everything’s Up to Date in Kansas City:

June 9-October 27 – Trouble in Paradise: Japanese Contemporary Art
Spotlighting a trio of bad-kid artists – Takashi Murakami, Yoshitomo Nara and Chicho Aoshima – this show will turn your ideas of Japanese art inside out. Playful with undertones of sheer evil, its cute protagonists clearly don’t have the best interests of the world at heart. It will be one of the inaugural exhibits of the new Bloch Building, a landmark of contemporary architecture by designer Steven Holl.



June 9-December 30 – Developing Greatness: The Origins of American Photography, 1839 to 1885
300 works from early daguerreotypes and snapshots to the Civil War, Western landscapes and portraits of the era’s “celebrities” – both classic images and newly discovered ones never before seen or published – all chosen from the recently acquired Hallmark Photographic Collection.

And mark your calendar for next year’s follow-up:
March 8, 2008-June 2, 2008 – In the Public Eye: Photography and Fame
Before People Magazine and after, i.e., from the 1860s to the present, the camera toiled ceaselessly, recording the doings of the stars, shutter clicked by the likes of Mathew Brady, Edward Steichen, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Imogen Cunningham, Irving Penn, Richard Avedon, Arnold Newman, Andy Warhol and Annie Liebovitz.

All, at the Nelson Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri.


The Bra-Burners of the ‘60s Had Early Inspiration

May 9-August 5 – Poiret: King of Fashion
Metropolitan Museum of Art, Manhattan

Paul Poiret (1879-1944) put Edwardian women in pantaloons and urged them to discard their corsets. His groundbreaking designs for comfortable and beautiful women’s clothing will be featured in the latest outing from the Met’s Costume Institute along with the obligatory book/catalog. Arguably the first modern designer, Poiret draped fabric designed by Raoul Dufy and others into creations of superb style. A Don’t Miss Exhibit.





Barcelona Si, Gaudí Si Si Si

It doesn’t matter what your own house looks like, as long as there are great-looking houses across the street and next door, right? Perhaps the ultimate expression of that philosophy is currently on offer in Spain’s design capital, Barcelona.  In the heart of gorgeous Passeig de Gracia, PG45 is a new condo developed by Hines. Chez Spark is seriously thinking of relocating to one of the penthouse duplexes, hang the cost. From there, we reckon, we’d have the best views of two neighboring Modernist masterpieces, Gaudí’s Casa Batllo next door, and his stupendous, there’ll-never-be-another-like-it apartment building, La Pedrera, a.k.a. Casa Milà across the boulevard. Other Modernist icons surround the block.  We’re so there.




The Holidays are Over, Hallelujah

But the melody lingers on. If you have any cash leftover, hasten to Target. You might get lucky and find the Tord Boontje dishes on sale. They’re swell and a steal at twice the price. They’re scarce but try the oldest Target store in the neighborhood. Talk about a Dutch Master.




Americana Stars in Auctions This Week

The Wall Street Journal’s Weekend Journal says decoys, Victorian furniture and weathervanes are hot properties in the current round of New York auction house offerings. Chez Spark can get behind two of those but faux ducks have never been something we’d want in our Passeig de Gracia pied-a-terre.

Not exactly Americana, but close enough, maritime art stars in its own auction at Christies on January 31 including such gems as this folk art diorama of an outbound clipper ship under full sail being led by a steam paddle tug, estimated to go for $2,500 to $3,500. Other lots are even more modestly tagged, including an assortment of various yacht china and silver and silver plate from the yacht Enchantress.

As a class of objects, Americana is decidedly iffy, but the best examples are thrilling – you can appreciate anything if it’s well-crafted. Want proof?  Mary Emmerling’s 1980 classic American Country: A Style and Sourcebook is available on Amazon’s used listings. Many of her subsequent titles are also worthwhile. Among the best:  Mary Emmerling’s American Country Classics and Mary Emmerling’s American Country Cottages.  The lady herself is creative director of Country Home magazine, and her influence suffuses its pages. Thanks to her, we can all learn to appreciate the things we once scorned as corny, like the Stars and Stripes, or porch brackets covered in peeling white paint. The jury is still out on cut-outs of bend-over people for the garden.


Get Thee to Paris for Maison et Objet, January 26-30

With 2,500 exhibitors, there will be plenty of design eye-candy for the home. Don’t neglect the workshops: The Financial Times calls out the presentation on black humor in interior design and “Funk Shui” by designer Nelli Rodi, subtitled “a festive cocktail between disco revival and neo-cabaret.” 

We hope the black humor workshop includes Timorous Beasties, a truly twisted take on toile and other fabrics, wall coverings and accessories for interiors – and we mean that in a good way. 



The modern London skyline toile is a particular favorite of ours – note the Gherkin, aka 30 St. Mary Axe, the Swiss Re tower in the center medallion:


Japan and the Effect of Design on Home and Social Life

Might be ghastly, might be good, but when Japan’s involved, we’re willing to take a chance. Starting Sunday until Jan. 22, the City of Nagoya’s International Design Center hosts the 15th “Design for Social Innovations” conference on how design can make a difference in everyday life; its accompanying exhibit that runs through Feb. 4. It’s worth checking out the website for the speakers’ visual portfolios.


 

 

For an even better view of Gehry’s design process, check out Sydney Pollack’s sterling documentary, “Sketches of Frank Gehry” (2005), now airing on PBS stations nationwide as part of the American Masters series.  My attention didn’t wander for the entire 75 minutes. The film had a theatrical release, too – on Sony Pictures, which also has a swell web site on the documentary.


Through a Single Lens
Speaking of designing men, Tyler Brule, founding editor of Wallpaper and newly retired Financial Times columnist, will launch Monocle, an international business and design magazine in February. "I've spent a lot of time in airports and I see so many consumers picking up Conde Nast Traveller, Wallpaper, then Business Week and the Economist and ... I thought there could be no harm in actually trying to combine those things," he said in an interview in The Scotsman.

A European outlook with an eye for the burgeoning Asian market, “bookish” graphics and 240 pages of print content with video clips available via the Web will be produced by a 22-person editorial team based in London. The new mag will be funded by a very brave group of private investors, considering the existing competition, the upcoming Conde Nast Portfolio magazine and a wretched advertising climate. Brule will continue to run his branding consultancy, Wink Media.



More proof that Asia is worth careful scrutiny: check out the Design for Asia Award winners from the Hong Kong Design Centre, recognizing good design that is influential within Asia.  They range from the predictable (iPod and iPod Nano) to the Odakyu Electric Railway “Romance Car”:




Three Must-See Exhibits


Made to Scale: Staircase Masterpieces

More than 20 staircase models, mostly French, mostly 18th and 19th century, through June 3 at the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum in New York City.  Thrilling, if small-scale, the models take the viewer back to a time of quality and craftsmanship, as well as incredible engineering.




Extended through March 18 - so you have no excuse to miss this survey of French glass pioneer René Lalique at Toronto’s Royal Ontario Museum.  Deco Lalique includes 60 examples of lighting, vases, jewelry and more created between 1910 and 1945, with complementary works by Lalique’s contemporaries.




“Fashion Show: Paris Collections 2006” at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston highlights runway (as opposed to real-world) garments from all the hotties: Azzedine Alaia to Yohji Yamamoto, and eight others in-between.  The Museum appears to be firing a shot over the gunwales of Manhattan’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, long considered the premier showcase for vintage fashion – itself having squashed the fashion ambitions of the Brooklyn Museum. Oh, I know, they’re all collegial and there’s room for everybody-- right. Through March 18 with lots of tasty lectures and events on offer.




Are any tile adverts as inspiring as those from Bisazza Mosaico? Certainly Ann Sacks has some wonderful tiles but for sheer exuberance, give me the room-size (and what rooms!) Bisazza layouts. Leopard, giraffe, Dalmatian patterns, riotous colors – it’s the kind of thing that gives Italian design a good name. At Chez Spark, each new series is examined and discussed with the anticipation usually reserved for a new model of Porsche – and we’re NOT talking about the Cayenne. Bisazza is widely available or visit the New York showroom at 43 Greene Street or flagship stores in Barcelona, Milan, Paris or London.




Speaking of aspirational, the LVMH Magazine is exclusively promotional, but somehow it isn’t obnoxious. It’s just right in presenting new products from Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton. Does that mean excellent design trumps the marketing message? Strangely appealing, although printed in a typeface not sympathetic to middle-aged eyes, it brings a world of sophisticated products to a medium filled with schlock – that is, the Internet.

 


Detroit’s Capital Theatre built in 1922

We’ll agree in advance – you can’t go home again. But you can see what home looked like, if you visit Naviciti's remarkable web views of Detroit and Pittsburgh in years past.  Naviciti is a Detroit-based interactive mapping and digital design firm. The historic 1976 Detroit map combines aerial photos, 3-D renderings and hundreds of details of downtown buildings, both demolished and extant. It also incorporates the AIA Guide to Detroit. The whole thing is a swell example of what technology can do and it’s way cool even if you aren’t a child of the Motor City. (Crain's Detroit Business , Jan. 1, 2007)


Fashion Gets Even More Personal