By Wendy Bright When Henry Clay’s two-story Federal style house near Lexington, Ky. was finished in 1809, he and his family settled there for the remainder of his life. While the original Ashland structure was of a relatively simple design (possibly by Benjamin Latrobe), it was more spacious and substantial...
Charles Bloszies’ epiphany arrived in 2004 on the wings of a Lamborghini languishing in a Florentine piazza. “It gave me an enlightened, enhanced appreciation,” he says. “It was an inspirational moment – I realized that the contrast of a new building of its time with an old building...
He may be trained as a designer, but Sean O’Hara thinks like a sculptor. The 1996 industrial design graduate from the Rhode Island School of Design went to Austria for graduate studies, then settled in at Dansk, designing flatware, cookware and tabletop products in a variety of materials. In 2002 he set up his own […]
Pioneering sound and light artist Christopher Janney needs to hit things. “I’m trained as a musician and an architect, but I’m really into percussion, like drums and a mallet,” he says. In 1984, Esquire magazine named him one of that generation’s individuals most likely to change the world. ...
By Ralph C. Muldrow, RA Well-known classical New York Architects Richard Sammons and Anne Fairfax (of Fairfax & Sammons Architects) noted the way that well-known architects couched their connection to Postmodernism with qualifiers that were more focused on what was not in their schemes during that...
By Ralph C. Muldrow, RA When famed architect Robert Venturi claims that he “is not now, and never was, a Postmodernist,” he’s evading the blanket label that architectural historian Charles Jencks once threw over a design movement’s entire body of work – including that of Venturi. Jencks,...
Before there was a Google or a Xerox or a Kleenex, there was the ultimate American brand known as Duncan Phyfe. An impoverished Scottish immigrant, he was a woodworker who arrived here just prior to the turn of the 19th century to set up shop in New York City. He soon become known as the […]
A noisy 3.5-kilometer stretch of the Autobahn that splits a section of west Hamburg from the rest of the city is about to receive the ultimate in noise abatement treatment. The city-state’s parliament has elected to cover the six-to-eight-lane highway, set in a 40-foot valley, with a green, noise-controlling...
For the record, Thais Fontenelle believes in understanding the difference between art and design. “A design piece actually has to have a function,” the creator of Inventory design collaborative in Miami says. To prove her point, she’s invited 11 designers and artists to display their work in “Inventory...
So what do Grace Kelly, Princess Diana, Jackie Kennedy and John Lennon all have in common? For starters, there’s the fame, the success, the celebrity – and the tragedy. And then there’s Andy Warhol, who not only obsessed over it all, but turned it into an art form too. “Andy Warhol: Fame and Misfortune,”...
