The 79-minute documentary Design is One: Lella & Massimo Vignelli, released on DVD last week, is a biography, of a kind, of the designer and his wife, originally hit the festival circuit in 2012. It neatly tracks Massimo and his wife Lella’s careers as the preeminent design team of the postwar era at something of a breakneck pace. A series of images of the Vignellis’ work flashes by at the start of the film as if we were quickly flipping through a retrospective (or high-end product) catalogue, and things don’t get much slower from there. Directors Kathy Brew and
“I don’t like his uniform,” said a world-renowned architect, dressed in khakis and a polo shirt, during a poolside conversation in Miami. “But I’m sure he doesn’t like mine either.” Related links Design Miami Dispatch: Highlights From the Fair Design Miami Dispatch: The Design District The he is Peter Marino, a prolific architect who is best known, these days, for showing up in public in full leather drag, with tattoos on his exposed arms and a Mohawk underneath his leather biker cap. Famous for designing houses for socialites, as well as stores for Chanel, Louis Vuitton, Dior, and other luxury
Olson Kundig Architects stacked and staggered glu-lam beams into a handsome, comfortable lounge for Design Miami. The chandelier is by Lilienthal | Zamora. Design Miami, now in its 10th year, has thrived since it moved from the Design District to a tent in the parking lot of the Miami Beach Convention Center. Outside the tent, a colorful pavilion by Jonathan Muecke offered relief from the expanses of white vinyl. Inside, Alan Maskin of Seattle’s Olson Kundig Architects also diverged from the tent aesthetic, stacking and staggering massive glu-lam beams into a handsome, comfortable enclosure, the fair’s Collectors Lounge. (The room
There were more construction workers than shoppers in Miami’s Design District on Tuesday. A glass loggia by Sou Fujimoto was finished, as was a storefront by Aranda\Lasch for Tom Ford on a corner lot. But much else awaited completion. Craig Robins’s plan to turn the Design District into a high-end fashion destination, with architecture as a draw, is proceeding fitfully. Related links Design Miami Dispatch: Highlights From the Fair Following a master plan developed by Duany Plater Zyberk (DPZ), Robins has created a north-south pedestrian “street” that ends in what is now called Palm Court, a plaza centered on a
Finalist GH-76091181 comprises a ring of slender, sculptural towers faced with timber shingles gathered around a cathedral-like central space. The Guggenheim Museum has chosen six finalists in the competition to design its planned Helsinki outpost. The museum announced the six names at a press conference in Helsinki this morning. It also released six sets of renderings, but kept the names and the images apart, noting that “under EU procurement rules the concepts must remain anonymous until the competition concludes.” The finalists will now refine their schemes, with a March deadline; the museum expects to announce its selection in June. The
Zaha Hadid reduced the size and toned down the expression of her initial design for the 2020 Tokyo Olympic Stadium, but it is still garnering criticism. In the latest round of public outcry over Tokyo’s 2020 Olympic Stadium, architect Arata Isozaki has stepped into the ring, joining a coterie of illustrious architects opposed to the project’s development. Though he favored the initial helmet-shaped scheme that landed the London architect Zaha Hadid the commission, the revised design has Isozaki deeply concerned. He convened last week with Hadid associate Satoshi Ohashi at a public forum in Tokyo intended to give both parties
Paul Katz, 57, President of Kohn Pedersen Fox, who led the firm’s growth as a global powerhouse in the design of large, mixed-use complexes, died unexpectedly last week. Katz, known for his extremely quick mind and dry wit, was a passionate advocate for the impact that good architecture and innovative planning could have on the world’s rapidly evolving cities. Gene Kohn, a founding partner, posted this announcement.
Russell Thomsen and Eric Kahn, partners at IDEA, were drawn to the subject of how the concentration camp in southern Poland will be experienced by future generations. The future of Auschwitz is a topic that would scare most architects away. But Russell Thomsen and Eric Kahn, partners in the Los Angeles firm IDEA, were drawn to the subject of how the concentration camp in southern Poland will be experienced by future generations. During visits to Auschwitz and nearby Birkenau, a 400-acre “annex” built expressly for extermination, they realized that, if the camp is to be maintained as a historic site,
Jean-Francois Bodin’s unassuming but arduous renovation of the beloved museum finally reaches completion. Jean-Francois Bodin is probably the most talented architect you have never heard of.He avoids publicity. His website is “in formation” though he opened his firm, Bodin and Associates, in 1983. He is modest to a fault. His spartan offices are located, with no sign, off of a nondescript 17th-century courtyard in the Marais section of Paris. He works around the corner from the neighborhood where he was born, grew up, and just spent the last five years reconfiguring the Musée Picasso, a quiet triumph of a
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