I'll only know
(what i know)
until the dawn comes.

the life of a lonely retail merchant.




























I'll only know
(what i know)
until the dawn comes.


images:
1. Gabriella Crespi
2. Marco Brunari (?)





Gabrielle Crespi:

Her guru, a disciple of Babaji, himself said to be an incarnation of Krishna, is the ''Yogi-Christ of Modern India.'' And, in a sense, Crespi is experiencing a kind of rebirth, too. There is a renewed interest in her furniture and accessory designs — about 1,500 all told, including lamps, silverware and jewelry, in a huge range of materials, from metal, wood, marble and bamboo to seeds, shells and gemstones. Produced mainly in the 1960's and 70's, her creations graced some of the most elegant homes in the world. Elizabeth Arden ''fell in love with my designs, and wanted everything in the collection,'' Crespi said recently. Thomas Hoving, Princess Grace, Gunther Sachs and the Shah of Iran were other aficionados.

from here...

Gaetano Pesce!

Gaetano Pesce gives a talk at Hammer Museum, Los Angeles.
And his retropsective opens in Los Angeles the same evening!

Just found out that Gaetano Pesce is giving a lecture at the Hammer Museum next week!
And the opening of a retrospective of his work at the Italian Cultural Institute of Los Angeles.

Anyone going, drop me an email.....?

The first retrospective in the Western United States of architect, artist, designer Gaetano Pesce celebrates the maestro of art-design and his years of experimenting and creating works with polyurethane foam, resin, and plastics for such A-list companies as Cassina, B&B Italia and Meritalia.

Works on display include prototypes, production models, video, and audio produced throughout Pesce's 40-year career.

Gaetano Pesce
Co-presented with Istituto Italiano di Cultura.


Internationally renowned architect and designer Gaetano Pesce was born in 1939 in La Spezia, Italy, and studied architecture at the University of Venice. He has designed for companies such as Cassina, B & B Italia, Bernini, and Knoll International. His architectural work includes the Organic Building of Osaka, the Children’s House for Parc de la Villette, the Gallery Mourmons in Belgium, and the office for the New York advertising of agency TBWA\Chiat\Day. Pesce received the prestigious Chrysler Award for Innovation and Design in 1993 and the Fashion Institute of Technology’s Lawrence J. Israel Prize in 2009.







-----------------------------

Scott Burton

taken from NY TIMES,
an obituary by Roberta Smith.
Jan 1, 1990.

Scott Burton, an American sculptor whose work balanced stubbornly and elegantly between art and furniture while evolving into a new kind of public sculpture,
died of AIDS on Friday at Cabrini Medical Center in New York City.

He was 50 years old and lived in Manhattan.

By the end of his life, Mr. Burton's simple yet eye-catching benches, stools and chairs, cut from smooth and sometimes jagged pieces of granite, could often be found with people sitting on them in several North American cities, including Seattle, Cincinnati, New York City, Portland, Ore., and Toronto.

---------

Mr. Burton, a small, wiry man known for his erudition, verbal precision and explosive laugh, worked as a critic and an editor for Art News and Art in America before becoming a full-time artist. He emerged in the late 1960's and early 70's as part of an artistic generation that came of age in the shadow of Minimalism.

Uncertain that his passion for furniture and design could ever lead to an artistic career, he turned to literature, obtaining an B.A. from Columbia in 1962 and an M.A. from New York University in 1963. By the mid-60's he was working regularly as a freelance critic for Art News, then under the editorship of Thomas B. Hess.

Elizabeth C. Baker, the editor of Art in America and formerly the editor of Art News, worked with Mr. Burton at both publications. ''As a critic his enthusiasms were passionate, his dislikes were categorical,'' she said. ''He wrote as he would later cut granite, with high style, great clarity of form and a very sharp edge.''

At the end of his life, Mr. Burton's interests in dissolving the boundary between art and design took him into the curatorial realm. Last spring, at the invitation of Kirk Varnedoe, the director of the department of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, he organized an exhibition of Brancusi's works at the museum.

In it, some of Brancusi's bases were exhibited on their own, as sculptures in their own right, a treatment that outraged some critics, while impressing others.






















The art historian Robert Rosenblum said of him yesterday: ''Scott was as singular and unique as a person as he was as an artist. His fiercely laconic work destroyed the boundaries between furniture and sculpture, between private delectation and public use and radically altered the way we see many 20th-century masters, including Gerrit Rietveld and Brancusi.''











-------------------------------

Paul Mathieu
































"French designer, Paul Mathieu, based both in New York and Aix-en-Provence, exhibits his signature style in his furniture collection for Ralph Pucci International.

Mathieu is a progressive designer who gained his reputation through both his international interrior design projects, as well, as, his product designs for companies such as Ecart.

An unmistakable benchmark is evident in the graceful and elegant modernism infused in Mathieu's work. His furniture combines the unassuming harmony of nature, blending sinuous curves with tailored geometry. Mathieu's designs combine richness and depth of woods with the comfort of upholstery and with detail. This results in a refined statement of clean, luxurious simplicity."

via ralph pucci

The Folding Walls!

screens screens
we all screen
for more screens.

-- -- -- --


Lately, Ive become fascinated with screens, as
sculpture, as energetic divides into space, and as an element in a room.
Don't want to build a wall, then get a screen!

Function + Beauty + Ability to Fold = Hells yes!
Just as Anne Truitt built columns, or sculptural voids in the form
of rectangles to the sky, these collection of artists, architects, and designers
are taking the idea of a traditional screen and making it their own.

Are they paintings that fold, or painted sculptures that slink on the floor?
Or possibly mere decoration, ugh I'm not even sure anymore.
Call them what you will, or just unfold one in your colonial living room, or private
white-walled modern gallery, or just simply stare at them on this screen like me.
Enjoy.



-- -- -- -- --

Untitled, 2008

Wood, stain, cotton

SHUTTER

Screen Printed Sand-washed Silk Lacquered Mahogany

silkscreen on wood
2009

"Each piece is made from Hinoki (Japanese Cypress), an elegant and pleasantly scented wood that is highly rot-resistance and does not require any additional oils or waxes. Hinoki is the most luxurious wood used in the craft of Tategu."

The Folding Walls!
screens screens
we all screen
for more screens.





1. Egon Eiermann: dark green screen. A functionalist, and an architect. 1904 - 1970.
2. Eva Berendes. Her work haunts me on so many levels.
3. India Carpenter. Read my interview with her here, and see more of her work.
4. Scheltens Abbenes, read more here.
5. BCXSY. I first read about these guys at SightUnseen. Take a look at their article here! A cooperative between designers Boaz Cohen and Sayaka Yamamoto. BCXSY is a multi-disciplined experience that creates and develops concepts, identities, products, graphics, interiors and atmospheres.






-------------------------

Laurel Broughton, of WELCOME

YHBHS Interview
with
Laurel Broughton,
of WELCOME

"Often overlooked as architects, the Eames were really good and serious at making their whole lives seem like a giant picnic. There is a joy in their design process as much as in the products themselves. That is much closer to what I want."

-Laurel Broughton

brief bio?
I grew up in Santa Monica at the beach. I moved to NYC to go to college and somewhere along the line I started working at Zing Magazine and then became the managing editor. Zing was an amazing experience both for the places that it took me and the people I got to work with. I studied comparative literature and critical theory with a focus on semiotics in college and the more I was involved in the art world and in the production of an object—the magazine— the more it was a natural evolution to the thinking about the design of objects and environments and buildings in a narrative way.

Eventually I moved back to Los Angeles to study architecture ending up at SCI_arc. After that I worked with a few of different architecture and design offices but most consistently for Johnston Marklee. Right now I'm focused on WELCOME as a multi-disciplinary design practice- and I am teaching in the School of Architecture at USC.










I was so inspired by the whole wall unit series. It is so interesting on so many levels. Can you talk about where the idea came from?
The first Whole Wall actually came out of my thesis project at SCI_arc called folk- it was a body of work produced around ideas about the relationship that the avant-gardes typically have to "newness" and thinking about folk culture as a movement that can create "newness" without demanding a break from the past. I produced prototypes for a number of furniture objects using traditional crafts and commonplace building techniques and materials as a jumping off point but often using new methods or technologies along the way.














The original Whole Wall was one these prototypes. In someways the basic idea is there in the title— Whole Wall- I've taken the notion of a type-V or balloon frame wall construction-studs, insulation, sheathing etc and have given it well—a girth, a thickness and a collage of textures, making something very standard into something decorative but still functional. I'm interested in ideas of appropriation, craft, layering, and also about how we use space and how (in this case) a piece of furniture can actually act as a "wall" or a divider of space. The Whole Wall Shelf is designed to be "in the round"- a screen on one side and a shelf on the other or it can be part screen part shelf on each side. The user can organize it to suit their space or to change their space. Right now I'm translating it from the prototype into a series of pieces that can be produced and sold on a wider scale- adding a desk, a bench and ideally a cabinet to the family. I've also been wanting to make a really big one...a wall literally.




how long is has taken to complete?
Since I finished my thesis in the fall of 2006, I guess you could say I've been working on the Whole Wall Family for 4 years but really in its latest incarnation, just for the last few months. I'm hoping the Shelf, Desk and Bench will be ready by the Fall.

Whole Wall Family

I find it so interesting that your background is in architecture, and this piece of furniture is almost a play on that.
I think of architecture as a way of thinking about things and a way of having a conversation with what's around us— a narrative as a communicative device. I'm interested in ideas about scale and space making that architecture deals with. So can a piece of furniture create space in the way that architecture does, or what happens when a piece of furniture relies on similar systems either- in the case of the Whole Wall, a building system or a material organization or a pattern or geometric system.









Did you ever have difficulties with the seriousness of the architect community?
Yes, I often find most of the architecture community is too serious— architecture doesn't need to be a tragedy. Often overlooked as architects, the Eames were really good and serious at making their whole lives seem like a giant picnic. There is a joy in their design process as much as in the products themselves. That is much closer to what I want.

Atelier Bow Wow

I know so little about contemporary architecture, anyone you could turn me on to?
Hmm...I really appreciate the Japanese firm, Atelier Bow Wow. They have a way of being both serious and playful at the same time... finding and documenting amazing occurrences in the built environment of Tokyo and then using those observations in their own work. Their houses are lessons on making the most of small spaces.














Your pieces seem to celebrate "PLAY", almost a melting pot of Ettore Sottsass, Pee Wee's Playhouse, Roy McMakin, and others. Anyone you are specifically inspired by in your life?
You've hit the nail on the head! Definitely Ettore Sottsass and Roy McMakin play a huge roles and they make for strange bedfellows...Sottsass's use of color and shape and McMakin's subtle play with the domestic everyday. Pee Wee's Playhouse use to really creep me out as a child but now I think about Gary Panter's work all the time. I've been thinking a lot lately about the way we create relationships to objects sometimes by giving them personalities— anthropomorphizing our belongings- Gary Panter on the Pee Wee's Playhouse set took that super far.









Did you have a favorite board game as a kid?
I loved Clue...the board with the plans of all the rooms, the different floor materials and the little game pieces...- the language that was involved—"Cornel Mustard in the drawing room with the candle stick."












Plans for WELCOME for the upcoming year?
Yes I have tons of plans! Next month, Wagon, my first product is launching which I'm really excited about. I'm also working on a commission for a small group of jewelry for a friend who is launching an online store. And there is the aforementioned Whole Wall Furniture Family in the Fall.







What were two things you wanted to be when you were a kid?
I think I wanted to be a writer and an architect...kinda boring that I actually am both. I'm realizing in my old age that I'm pretty single-minded, as much I as think I'm off track I'm not...a good and a bad thing I suppose.

Knotted in the style of loose macrame or net,
Knot Security Curtain echoes the diamond pattern of a chainlink fence
or security grate and provides a softer side of security.
To be hung inside or outside!!!

A native Angeleno, Laurel explores her interests in the roles of material culture, craft, and style within architecture and design through collaborations and publications with and without WELCOME. She received her B.A. from New York University (NYU) and her M.Arch from the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI_arc), she is a certified LEED AP. Prior to her architectural training, Laurel was managing editor at zingmagazine in New York City. Laurel has experience working with a diverse group of architects, designers and artists including Johnston Marklee, Greg Lynn, Sussman/Prejza, Bestor Architecture, Taalman/Koch and Jeffrey Inaba as well as the artists Ester Partegas and Devon Dikeou. She teaches design studio in the USC School of Architecture. Her writing and designs have appeared in a variety of forums including, Volume, North Drive Press and the Storefront for Art and Architecture. She is also a partner in Euneveuver.

Thank you Laurel!
Go to Welcome site here...

YHBHS Interview
with
Laurel Broughton,
of WELCOME

-------------------------

sitting
in
for
art's
sake.

james hyde,
big beanbag, 2005

Acrylic on linen, inflatable packing stuffing, 72 x 72 x 72 inches

"James Hyde’s “Big Beanbag” sets the intellect on a crash course with reality.
The swollen blob of a sculpture, with a diameter of roughly 6 feet, resembles an oversize beanbag chair or a beach ball gone wrong. Made of linen and inflatable packaging material, Hyde’s lumpen abstraction is also a 3-D painting, its surface covered with untidy swipes of acrylic in an organic palette of overripe vegetables and creamy pastels. Hyde makes the misbegotten mélange look unlovely yet sumptuous, a deflated ideal with its own funky spirit."

text taken from here.










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