John LaFarge was a late 19th century painter who studied at Newport, Rhode Island under William Morris Hunt, brother of Beaux-Arts master architect Richard Morris Hunt. LaFarge would go on to illustrate books by Tennyson and Browning, and paint his first mural for Trinity Church in Boston. But it’s...
Most architects, author Paul Andersen says, don’t like to be associated with patterns. There’s superficiality connected to them, as though they’re simply applied to the surface of a building and don’t affect its function at all. They don’t have much to do with context – and after all,...
He may have started out decades ago as a journalist in Manhattan, but Daniel Mack is now a sought-after furniture designer and architectural collaborator whose work is on display in the Whitney, Cooper Hewitt, and Boston’s Museum of Fine Art. “I was in New York in the early ‘70s,” he says. “I...
When the owners of a vintage Charles Moore residence in New Hampshire needed a dining room table, they turned to veteran woodworker Dan Mosham and Dorset Custom Furniture in Dorset, Vermont. Then they came back for the chairs. He’s been making furniture for more than thirty years now. He got started...
Curtis Olson started making art on a full-time basis less than a decade ago. Before that, he’d been practicing architecture in California and Wyoming for twenty years. “One Friday about eight years ago, I was driving to my grandmother’s memorial service in Missoula, Montana and thinking of the unfulfilled...
A seemingly inseparable pair, Charles and Henry Greene were born in Cincinnati a little more than a year apart in 1868 and 1870, attended manual training school together at Washington University in St. Louis, then headed off to MIT for their two-year degrees in architecture. When their parents moved...
Seventeen years ago, Cedric Smith turned a love for advertising into a career as an artist. He’d been working as a barber’s apprentice in Atlanta. “To me, cutting hair was like sculpting,” the forty-year-old painter says. When Mississippi artist William Tolliver came into the shop for a trim,...
In a slim little volume that’s eminently readable, visionary architects Amale Andraos and Dan Wood have documented how their firm, WORKac, recruited a team of 150 collaborators, built an elevated urban farm at the Museum of Modern Art’s P.S.1 courtyard in Queens, New York, and put on a party...
Like Frederick Law Olmsted, Alex Garvin has been working with parks his entire life. With dual degrees – one in architecture and another in city planning – he’s taught at Yale University for the past 43 years. He helped usher in the transformation of Atlanta’s Beltline from train tracks to urban...
Steve Guarnaccia isn’t naming any names, but his “Three Little Pigs” bear a certain resemblance to some familiar faces. The chair of the illustration program at Parsons The New School for Design, former art director for The New York Times op-ed page and illustrator for Rolling Stone and New York,...
