If you are one to break into architectural studios in the middle of the night, think twice about breaking into dO|Su in Los Angeles. There, its principal Doris Sung keeps her collection of critters, self-propelled, self-assembling, super-smart thermal bi-metal robots — requiring no batteries, just space enough to perform their backflips, scooches, summersaults and other behaviors that collectively would freak out any…
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Why Frette in Bed? | Design Times
Swatches by Louis Postel, Editor in Chief, Design Times Volume 9, Number 1 This Bedroom Issue of Design Times reminds us of a designer we knew who did a lot of fretting with his now ex-wife under their damask Frette sheets. He slept “neat,” with his feet snug and the sheets all tucked-in, while she had to be messily unencumbered with…
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“NON!” from Design Times
It took Solomon+Bauer Architects to wake up This 9,000-square-foot French beauty in Chestnut Hill. By LAURA J. MACKAY Photographs by Bruce Martin The house— very French in temperament as well as design –had spoken. There would be no blue hallway, among other things. “I wanted to have a blue hallway,” recalls the owner. “I saw a picture in a magazine,…
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The Underlying Pattern
Trump Plaza residents vowed they would do whatever it took to fight artist Michael Singer’s South Cove Regeneration Project in West Palm Beach. His plan for “stepped tidal gardens along the seawall, tidal islands of mangroves and spartina” and other salt-marsh grasses, as well as sludge-filtering oyster reefs, would look like a swamp. Not the kind of artwork they had in mind…
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A Straw in the Sky
For a miracle machine, capable of nudging humanity back from the rocky ledge of eco-suicide, it looks inauspicious—like a fridge with waffle-like filters finning the air. It’s the kind of thing Sears will gladly remove and replace. But hold on!
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Warm Cool Warm
What makes cities exciting, poetic, worth waking up for? The short answer is lights at night. At 1 a.m., a bedsheet hung up to dry in Venice reflects the moon over a canal (reflected once more in the water). We are enchanted, mesmerized. At 2 a.m., a smashed window in a forlorn Cleveland underpass twinkles like a star. We don’t back away, afraid,…
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Zillow Talk
er Kate Coughlin of Boston, MA has clients anyone would want: “They want to have a lot of fun. They are after a more light-hearted, family-friendly aesthetic…tired of all the heavy brown furniture. One very traditional client I am working with now just requested a neutral palette dotted with mid-century pieces for her new home in Aspen.”
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Advocacy for Architects
Social media advocacy marketing just doesn’t work for design firms. The content being posted is just too subtle, or too confidential, and the stakes far too high. After all, what employee of an architectural firm in his right mind would risk blogging, sharing, tweeting or posting about a project voluntarily on his own Facebook page, or Twitter account? It’s…
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Is There Life Beyond Sustainability?
The 140-bed hospital complex stops time, like a long-lost friend you run into where you’d least expect to. In such a surprise occurrence, past and future appear to come to a standstill. Here, just outside Rwanda’s capital of Kigali, it’s impossible to ignore that the site once held a police outpost in the whirlwind of mass murder.
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Mix Master
In his Crown Heights, Brooklyn, studio last year Charles Goldman was reading the New York Times. After weighing its symbolic value as a “spreader of information,” he launched a series of “plop sculptures” out of mashed issues of the Times. “Then I left a bucket overnight by accident,” Goldman recalls. “In the morning I kicked it over. The contents had become solid, and…
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Messy, But Not Too
A 3,500-acre retreat in the Western Ghats of India: a 100-room lodge, a spa with 12 villas, cultural programming demonstrating the role of the music, art, and literature in promoting a sustainable way of life. A summons from the City of Philadelphia for growing grass over ten inches high around her house, as reported by Anne Raver in the New York…
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Where designers go for antiques
by Louis Postel, first published in New England Home / Connecticut | November, 2016 How do you separate the super serious designer from the merely serious? Had you been at the opening of the R.T. Facts Gallery on 8 Barns Road in Kent, CT one Saturday night in June, the difference between super serious and serious would have been as…
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Five Easy Packing Pieces | Showboats, January 2017
Imagine tossing one of these babies in the overhead bin. Then dragging it along the quay with for a midnight triste. And, later, on a bet, trying to escape from one like Houdini, wrapped in chains. However difficult—even laughable— such feats are to imagine, boxy steamer trunks have upsides the design world’s just waking up to. Such luggage has the…
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Beauty and the Beasts: Exploring the Art and Architecture of Estate Agriculture
By Louis Postel, as seen in New England Home, Special Spaces, November 2016 If you close your eyes and listen to the clip-clop of a great steed being led across the cobblestone courtyard with a three-spouted fountain playing counterpoint into a cistern behind, it’s easy to imagine yourself reincarnated as one of those riders born to royalty you read about…
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Our Inner Cities | Louis Postel for New England Home, Feb 2017
How do you paint what’s going on inside your skull? Heidi Whitman hails from a long line of artists who make such invisible things visible. In 14th century Florence, the architect and painter Giotto di Bondone thawed out frozen-faced divines with a human warmth. Impressionists such as Mary Cassatt and Henri Matisse infused pictures with light and movement. Later, in the…
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Today’s Design Tack
by Louis Postel | Trade Secrets | first published in New England Home, November 2016 “Are you calling about the Olympics?” asked designer Lynne Shore of Rhode Island Kitchen and Bath in Newport, RI. “So many reporters have been calling. It turns out the state of Rhode Island wants to give all its Olympic medalists special license plates, and there’s…
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Major Mashups
by Louis Postel as seen in Showboats International, November 2016 The Modernism Moment looks here to stay for mega yacht design from hull to hardware. The clean lines born of Modernism’s form-is-function aesthetic just makes so much over-arching sense, especially at sea. Efficiency, elegance, and a low-key elitism continue to find inspiration in Le Corbusier’s Vers Un Architecture of 1923,…
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Mapping Social Media | Graphisoft USA
by Louis Postel for Graphisoft USA | July 2016 How the AEC Community is discovering new ways to build business on Main Street Part One: First stop, Pinterest. “I know at least half my advertising works,” said the prosperous business man. “The problem is figuring out which half that is.” For AEC professionals charged with allocating resources to promotion and…
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Grid Type Gallery
A few months ago, we found ridiculously cheap plane tickets for Boston and off we went. It was our first visit to the city and, believe it or not, Stockholm in February was more pleasant than Boston in March. It probably has a lot to do with the fact that we arrived completely unprepared. That I, in my converse and…
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Brysontiller Let Me Explain
Short of Blue Ivy storming the stage, showing off her mommy-rivaling toddler pipes, and then spontaneously releasing her debut album, we’ve basically come to the point where Beyoncé can’t outdo herself (and yet, she still does), so this husband-wife tour makes perfect sense.
