Winter 2012
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Greenwich Scene Time
Each year the London Design Festival (LDF) seems to grow in scope and aspiration. Now in its ninth year, 2011’s fest featured presentations by 280 designers and their partners and almost three hundred events about work covering twenty-five design disciplines. As well, the LDF boasted twelve commissioned design projects installed at museums and venues all [...]
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Finn-al Exam
Dallas design dealer Abby Malowanczyk, whose gallery, Collage 20th Century Classics, specializes in Scandinavian design, rates the work of Finn Juhl, one of the most creative and prolific design talents Denmark produced…
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Skullduggery
By any standard, Crystal Head Vodka—a three-year-old liquor just now being widely released in stores—is a juggernaut of branding. It has a celebrity purveyor (Dan Aykroyd), the manufacturers make florid claims about the purity of their product (it’s filtered through 500 million-year-old crystals!)…
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Making It Happen
For jaw-dropping theatricality, it’s hard to beat the surreal wreckage created in New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina. But Brad Pitt is making another sort of spectacle in the city’s Lower Ninth Ward. Through the Make It Right Foundation, which he helped found in 2007, the actor and philanthropist has turned a devastated working-class enclave into a world-class architectural showplace…
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Koloman Moser Armchair
The basic shape of this armchair is a cube. Both the rigidity of its geometrical form and its reduced coloring are hallmarks of the Wiener Werkstätte, founded by Koloman Moser and architect Josef Hoffmann in 1903, the year the chair was designed…
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Perfect Composition
The apartment of art dealer Douglas Baxter offers a stellar blend of art and design.
Collecting blue chip art is something of an occupational hazard for Douglas Baxter. The president of New York’s Pace Gallery has helped nurture the careers of heavyweight artists such as Robert Mangold, Joel Shapiro, Elizabeth Murray, Donald Judd, and Sol LeWitt—and works by all of them… -
“Grand Repos” designed by Jean Prouvé
Lot 35 Artcurial/ Briest-Poulain-F. Tajan “Jean Prouvé ‘Structure Nomade’ et pièces de mobiliers historiques de Charlotte Perriand, Le Corbusier, Jean Prouvé et Pierre Jeanneret” sale in Paris, October 24: A sheet metal and leather fauteuil “Grand Repos” designed by Jean Prouvé in 1930.
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Pure Power
In Tel Aviv, an architect designs a house with a mesmerizing blend of lightness and strength.
The defining moment in Irit Axelrod’s career as an architect arrived a few years back in Barcelona, during her first visit to the replica of the German Pavilion designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe for the international exposition held in the Catalonian city in 1929… -
Man of Action
With his dynamic, often mind-boggling works, Hervé van der Straeten has become one of the hippest—and most highly collected—designers working today.
You might be tempted to wonder whether Hervé van der Straeten believes in the laws of physics. Stunning gravity-defying consoles, for example, are one of the French designer’s fortes… -
Making It Happen
Houses topped by boats and barges. Roofs folded like origami birds. Exterior walls peeled away to reveal tangled plumbing. A progress report on housing relief efforts in New Orleans.
For jaw-dropping theatricality, it’s hard to beat the surreal wreckage created in New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina. But Brad Pitt is making another sort of spectacle in the city’s Lower Ninth Ward. Through the Make It Right Foundation, which he helped found in 2007, the actor and philanthropist has turned a devastated working-class enclave into a world-class architectural showplace.
