Over on BldgBlog, Geoff Manaugh has a post up about Gijs Van Vaerenbergh’s “Upside Dome” installation at St. Michiel’s in Leuven. It’s so beautiful I can’t help but post a picture of it here—I’m a sucker for the Belgian Baroque, and modern interventions to it. The piece, I suppose from the title, is a physical inversion of the church’s actual dome. But it looks just as much as if it might be some grid from William Gibson-land that is dripping into the elaborate old space, and that it will soon spread out and cover the entire nave in its matrix. It’s amazing how solid the volume contained by the drooping net appears, when it’s really just air. An ethereal effect, and in the right space for it.

As a kid in 70s-era New York, I wasn’t especially attuned to home decor. But there was one thing I did notice: virtually all of my friends’ parents had the same tableware. The dishes were a heavy, gray stonewear, rimmed by a pair of concentric navy bands. Cups and serving bowls had an abstracted floral pattern in the same navy shade. A handsome modern design, and utilitarian—my parents used them for everything: a formal dinner party, a quick meal. They were essentially indestructible, which is why, to this day, my parents still use those same plates. As do my best friend’s parents. Etc.

This wonderful tableware was made by the Finish firm Arabia and designed by Ulla Procopé. I discovered this only recently, which shows just how blind even a design writer can be to design, but is also a testament to the new book on D/R by Jane Thompson and Alexandra Lange, which inspired me to look. I knew Design Research primarily through the brilliant concrete and glass building Ben Thompson designed as its Cambridge flagship, and hadn’t quite understood its critical position in the dissemination of modern design in the American home. Certainly I had no idea about the close connection between D/R and Julia Child. That section alone is worth the price of admission, but really the whole thing is terrific, and looks great too, thanks to design by Michael Bierut.

As it is, my parents did not purchase their Arabiaware at D/R. They bought it at Pottery Barn, back when Pottery Barn was still a discount shack, and the means of display was simply to leave the goods out in boxes overflowing with shaved-wood packing. More serious kitchen items were purchased at Bridge, and there was Zabar’s to fill the pantry. D/R was not in their repertoire, but we spent many hours at Conran’s in CitiCorp Center.

It’s sad that today we have nothing analogous to D/R (or Conran’s in its original, low-price incarnation), retailers that offered modern design at modest prices. We have Ikea on one pole and DWR (or Moss?) on the other. Wouldn’t it be nice if there were something in between?

I will refrain from pimping it here too hard, being a member of the sponsoring organization, a friend of the triumvirate of visionaries who put it together, and a (limited) advisor on the proceedings (publishing division), but let me nonetheless urge you to visit SukkahCity, both on the Web and in its physical manifestation in Union Square Park, starting Monday. The sukkah, a (green!) temporary structure erected to celebrate the Jewish harvest festival, is an ideal form for an experimental architectural competition. What with this crap economy, it also happens to be a good time for a competition, as evidenced by the more than 1,400 entries to this one. At a preview out in Gowanus eariler this week, I was especially impressed with the pneumatic “Bio Puff” from Brooklyn’s own Bittertang—a throwback to what the late Marc Dessauce dubbed the Inflatable Moment. The rendering, above, is kind of somber, but the real thing is of clear plastic with a definite 60s/70s vibe. Check ’em all out.

The paperback of Master of Shadows hits the stands on October 6, but advances are in, and if I do say so myself, it looks fantastic. Many thanks to all my new friends at Anchor for seeing it through, and especially to John Gall, for his typically stellar cover design. If you’re a media pro and interested in it or its esteemed author, give a shout.

The new Yankee Stadium is heading toward the close of its second season, and though I can’t say I love it, I think I’ve come to terms with its existence. The abandoned old ballpark next door is now gone, having given way to construction fencing, so there’s no longer a specter looming ominously over the new joint. But that Yankee Stadium, the rough-and-ugly, 1970s-era edition of the House that Ruth Built, will always be my Yankee Stadium. It was a great public space—to walk up one of its tunnels to see the emerald field revealed below (stirring every time) was a lesson in what Philip Johnson called “procession.” It was an electric place when packed for a big game.

Baseball, of course, lives on the memories it inspires, and that place has left more that its share. As a tribute to it, last year Alex Belth published a series of the reminiscences of the old park on his indispensable blog, Bronx Banter. My contribution, about life in the bleachers in the 1980s is here. Now, Alex has collected all the pieces he commissioned, and added many more for a new book, Lasting Yankee Stadium Memories, out next month. It’s got an intro by Yogi Berra (who else?), and pieces by Richard Ben Cramer, Jane Leavy, Kevin Baker, and countless others. A great project, and a worthy memorial to a great New York place.

[Photo: NY1]

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about the Sony (nee AT&T) Building, as I research my Philip Johnson bio. It’s also been on the minds of the curators of the Victoria & Albert Museum, which recently purchased a presentation drawing of the project for a forthcoming show on Postmodernism. In an insightful post on the building and the controversy it engendered, the V&A’s Glenn Adamson quotes Michael Sorkin’s acid review of it: “The so-called ‘post-modern’ styling in which AT&T has been tarted up is simply a graceless attempt to disguise what is really just the same old building by cloaking it in this week’s drag, and by trying to hide behind the reputations of the blameless dead.” Alexandra Lange, on her blog, quotes this quote from Adamson. (Sorkin, as ever, makes great copy.) I’m going to save my bullets for later, but I just thought I’d point out that AT&T, love it or hate it, was hardly the “same old building”; that is, a generic office tower of stacked floor plates—what my friend Philip Nobel calls a “lasagna” building. (Or how about “Saltine“?) The AT&T was hardly standard. This is a thirty-eight story building, afterall, that rises to sixty stories (check out the grand staircase connecting the three executive levels, above), a building with a “sky lobby” and an attached museum (which, by the way, is now operational as the Sony Wonder Technology Lab—seriously—with free admission). Which is merely to say, this is no ordinary building.

Over the weekend I had the very good fortune to spend an afternoon with Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown at their home in suburban Philadelphia. I thought they might live in a house of their own design—and in a sense they do—but when I pulled up at the given address I found myself looking at something unusual and of an older vintage—almost Prairie School. It turned out to be an authentic Art Nouveau mansion, built in 1907, one of very few in the United States. They’ve called it home since the early 1970s; they found it driving through the area after visiting Bob’s mother at the famous house he designed for her, which is just a few minutes away.

A tour would come later, but for the moment we headed out to lunch, the three of us, to an unprepossessing nearby cafe, where student types were drinking their coffee and brunching. Bob and Denise, though a good four decades older than anyone else in the joint, were clearly regulars, and greeted as such by the staff. (Their order: a crepe with spinach and chevre.) We chatted a bit, and then walked back to the house, Denise providing a running commentary on their Mt. Airy neighborhood—I believe she called it a “dilapidated utopia”—its residents, and its architecture of handsome local schist. Bob ambled along a few steps behind in a seersucker blazer, armed against the light drizzle with a folding Princeton umbrella. We looked like a cartoon from 1953, or maybe characters from a Kingsley Amis novel.

Back to the house. The interior is a happy agglomeration of books and images and furniture, all stacked and piled according to a system knowable only to the proprietors. Denise likes to call herself architecture’s “Grandmother”—she looks the part, certainly—by which she means guardian of the field’s “institutional memory,” in particular the legacy of the work she and Bob have done together—together!—over the years. I think aunt and uncle might be a better analogy. They’ve always existed at something of a remove from architecture’s inner-family circle.

Period forms and vernacular images pushed up against each other and amplified in a humane, generous, and optimistic manner—that’s a rather simplified description of the Venturi & Scott Brown design philosophy. I’m not sure it always works in practice. But their own home is a wonderful representation of their ideas and aesthetic. I’m pretty sure there’s no better place to spend a few hours talking architecture on a rainy Sunday.

A few images follow, and apologies for their blurry quality.

The salon, or living room.

The walls, painted with a familiar floral pattern.

Work, in miniature.

Bob travelled Europe to find this vase.

Inspirational figures circle the dining room.

Happened in Vegas. Stays in Philly.

American Gothic.

Probably the only place in America where a McD’s sign can be used without causing immediate intellectual repulsion.

Mother’s House, just a few minutes away. It was not originally green, but shortly after its completion Bob was told “You can’t paint a house green.” So guess what.

Lou Kahn’s Esherick House is about 200 feet (and an architectural revolution) away.

PS: Bob has this image hanging above his desk at the office.

Eero Saarinen, who died prematurely in 1961, would have been 100 years old today. (I hadn’t noticed; a friend pointed it out on Twitter.) So much ink has been spilled about Saarinen in recent years, including by me, and his best work seems so fresh, that it’s hard to believe he’s been gone for nearly half a century. The “Style for the Job” man, so often disparaged by critics in his own time, now has a comfortable place in the pantheon of American architects. I’m glad that the work we did at Princeton Architectural Press, publishing a book on the TWA Terminal and then a monograph on his work, helped to open the floodgates of a new era of Saarinen scholarship.

I have the privilege of spending a great deal of time at Tanglewood, summer home of the Boston Symphony. In the late 1930s, the BSO wanted a concert hall for their new property in Lenox, Mass., and commissioned Eliel Saarinen to design it. But they didn’t have the budget, and he told them, eventually, that all they could afford was a shed. Eero worked on that design. It’s a utilitarian structure, a simple wedge open at the sides, not especially well detailed (not detailed at all). It is sited beautifully, however, and, like so much of Eero’s work, it gets the job done. There’s no better place to spend two hours. The orchestral accompaniment doesn’t hurt.

A couple of weeks ago we learned that I.M. Pei’s JFK Terminal 6 was slated for replacement. Today comes news that the Delta (originally Pan Am) Worldport, aka Terminal 3, is to meet the wrecking ball. Insult to injury: it’s not even for a new building, but to make extra room on the tarmac for planes taxiing to and from an expanded neighbor. As an unrepentant nostalgist and bona fide historian of JFK architecture, I’m going to be sorry to see the old concrete frisbee go. I’ve always enjoyed the circuitous up, down, and around path you have to take when you drive up to it—this may not be ideal functionally (or what the original architects had in mind)—but it’s a nice metaphor for beginning a journey. As my lunchmate Alexandra Lange writes over on her own blog, the Port Authority needs to come up with a plan for its iconic buildings, especially TWA. There should be a way to balance the exigencies of contemporary business with some kind of rational preservation.

Yes, there’s an archive of Johnson material for sale. Was it unknown? The Times seems to think so, but just about anyone who knows anything about Johnson was aware of it, and that it was in the possession of Raj Ahuja, a former partner who had won it in a judicial settlement with John Burgee, another partner. (This is a long story not to be recounted here, but suffice to say it made the front page of the Wall Street Journal, so was hardly a secret.) It should, in any event, prove enlightening on the years of Johnson’s association with Burgee, when his practice developed into a commercial juggernaut. Like Bob Stern, I hope it all stays together, and in a public collection.

For the record, the drawing above is an early version of the Boston Public Library addition. The project was in the office for nearly a decade. Here, the division of the facade into thirds has already been established. The massing, however, evolved from this fairly Miesian conception into the more monumental, Kahn-like structure we know today. It’s also a fair representation of Johnson’s typical drafting style.