Month: January 2010

The J-E-T-S are out of the playoffs following a valiant effort yesterday afternoon. That’s not a shocker, though their appearance in the AFC Championship Game certainly was surprising. Deserved credit went to the defensive schemes of head coach Rex Ryan, stellar play by DB Darrell Revis, and the smart decision-making of rookie QB Mark Sanchez. But maybe a game ball should also go to architect Roger Duffy of SOM. Duffy and his team designed the Jets’s state-of-the-art training facility in Florham Park, NJ, which opened last year. It is a high-tech place invented to give the Jets every conceivable advantage over their opponents. Temperature controls allow them to simulate any game condition. Anti-microbial materials and hand-washing stations keep the expensive workforce in good health. The entire place is designed down to the inch with every high tech accessory the coaching staff and players might need or want. It’s the NASA of football facilities. I reviewed it for ID last year.

As a kid, I was never one for the dinosaurs at the American Museum of Natural History. I preferred the darkened precincts of the Hayden Planetarium, specifically the giant mechanical spider that was its Zeiss Mark VI projector, a truly amazing contraption. But most of all I adored the extraordinary wildlife dioramas, with their vivid painted backdrops and proud beasts from exotic locales, trophies hauled in by men with names that seemed as if they were pulled straight from the films of the brothers Marx.

The presentation dioramas at the Harvard Museum of Natural History, wonderful in their own right, make for an excellent comparison. The animals in Cambridge are presented in large glass cases, and are arranged by region and species. This is ostensibly a more scientific presentation, though it’s hardly clinical.

It’s nice to have both options. After the jump, a few more shots from the AMNH.

Continue reading Big City, Big Game

If you’re familiar with Cambridge, or just Harvard Square, you probably know Ben Thompson’s wonderful Design Research building, now celebrating its 40th anniversary. Until recently it was home to a Crate & Barrel, a suitable tenant as it was originally conceived as a retail environment for modern furnishings. Thompson will forever be known for pioneering the “festival marketplace,” but D/R is his best work. Its plate-glass windows and thin concrete frame, coupled with reasonably priced goods, delivered on the optimistic promise of modernism, and spawned countless imitators (Gap, Pottery Barn, C&B, etc.). It’s a light and happy space—a kind of counterpoint to so many of its local contemporaries constructed of the same materials. (I’m looking at you, BGCS.) To celebrate the building’s anniversary, Thompson’s widow has organized an exhibition in the building, visible from the street, showing what D/R looked like at the moment it opened. (Lots of Marimekko!) It’s on until April, and you should definitely check it out if you’re in the area, though the good news is that a book will be coming out of it: “D/R: The Store That Brought Modern Living to American Homes,” written by Thompson and the redoubtable Alexandra Lange.

Which brings me to the subject of this post. In all the deserving publicity attendant with this installation, it has frequently been stated that D/R was the first modern furnishings store in Boston. But that’s not exactly true. In 1950, Ralph Rapson, one of the forgotten greats of midcentury design and then a teacher at MIT, opened a store, Rapson-Inc, on Darmouth Street, just off Copley Square. (It was a husband-and-wife operation run by Rapson and his wife Mary.) The image above, drawn by Rapson—he was a virtuoso draftsman—illustrated the store’s wares, which included work from the Eamses and Herman Miller. An Eames storage unit (at left), the most expensive item in the drawing, listed at $48. The rocker went for $38.50. (It now runs $479 on DWR.)

Rapson-Inc closed in 1951 (when the Rapsons left town), but it gave the Boston area a taste of what a modern design store might look like. Rapson, otherwise, has been sadly neglected in history. He was a cherubic man, and a beloved teacher—I had the pleasure to speak with him a few times. His most prominent American commission, the wonderful Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis, was destroyed to make way for a new building by Jean Nouvel. His most significant built home, the Pillsbury House, also in Minnesota, was likewise destroyed. He’s probably best remembered for his participation in the Case Studies program, and for his designs for US embassies overseas. The fine monograph on his work is highly recommended.

The two men who controlled the architectural conversation in New York (and hence America and the world) for better than two decades have recently published collections of their criticism. Paul Goldberger and Herbert Muschamp—how different their voices and predilections, and yet how confounding each could be in his own way. Goldberger: the voice of the establishment. Muschamp: the glamour-obsessed cosmopolitan. My final piece for ID magazine is a review of Building Up and Tearing Down, a collection of Goldberger’s recent writings primarily from the New Yorker. Goldberger makes for easy reading, a pleasant companion to the architectural scene, and he’s still going strong. Muschamp is gone now—he died of lung cancer in 2007—and it’s fair to say the architectural world is reduced by his absence, even if I was never a fan of either his opinions or his prose or his stewardship of the Times’s architectural coverage. Certainly, he made you pay attention, even if he set your eyes rolling. It’s hard to imagine a critic holding anywhere near the kind of power over the profession he wielded in his prime. The posthumous publication of his collected writings, Hearts of the City, makes for a good opportunity to think about his tenure, as I do in my review in the Los Angeles Times. Check ’em out.