Showing posts with label art. Show all posts
Showing posts with label art. Show all posts

25 January 2014

The silence of the lamps

Pardon the bad pun but if you keep reading it'll make sense.

Four years ago, I wrote a blog post about an Italian furniture studio I'd found on Twitter called CLAB4design. CLAB's still plugging away in Breschia and my now-friend Umberto Dattola's still at the helm and he's still creating beautiful work.

Umberto and I have kept in touch over the years and recently, he sent me some photos of his new collection of floor lamps.


In Italian, they're called Lampada Silente. That's Silent Lamp in English. In any language, they're simple, sculptural and absolutely beautiful.


He carves each of these lamps by himself, by hand.


The shades are made from thin sheets of poplar.


And the bases are made from linden.


The lamps are finished with an oil finish and the wood's left its natural color.


Each lamp is 190cm tall and can hold a standard lightbulb.


Silence Lamps are readily available in the EU and you can find out more information about EU sales on Umberto's website. Unfortunately, North Americans, Australians and the rest of the world are out of luck since CLAB4design doesn't have a distributor outside of the EU.

That wouldn't take much to remedy however. If you're interested in carrying the Silence Lamp or any of Umberto's other offerings, let me know and I'll put you in touch with him.

04 December 2013

Old techniques, new furniture



My friend Patrick Shilling is a master woodworker in Bethnal Green, London. Over the years he's carved out a niche for himself as a creator of exquisite, one of a kind interiors. Here are some examples of his work.




Never one to sit still, Patricks's been turning his hand to fine furniture and over the years has perfected a technique that uses an adze and a saw on English oak. The texture carved onto these pieces is done entirely by hand and that's something that's utterly unique in the world.


The finishes he's developed for this line mimic the appearance of stone, leather and charred timber but the attention to detail he employs never lets you lose sight of the fact that his pieces are made entirely of oak.


His passion for and love of his craft shine through this entire collection and I invite you to take a look through the gallery on his website. Whether it's a wardrobe, a table, a room divider, a larder or any of the pieces in this collection, all of it's breathtaking.


If you're interested in Patrick's work, you can contact him through his website. He's also looking for dealers in the UK, the EU, The US and anywhere else in the world you might be. So if furniture's your thing, drop him a line.


It's an easy cliche to fall back on the idea that no one makes high quality furniture by hand anymore and people like Patrick Shilling are living proof that the cliche's simply not true.

30 September 2013

My life on Instagram

In the last year and a half I've posted 642 photographs on Instagram and in the process, learned that I'm not a bad photographer. I've learned plenty more than that of course, but that's been my big takeaway.

When I started Instagramming I was a real stickler about only using my telephone's camera and only using the editor that's built into the app. I'm not not so picky anymore. I still use my phone's camera from time to time but there are two other cameras I've been using too. I never identify my equipment just to keep people guessing.

I used to look to this blog as a way to document my life but more and more, it's what I'm starting to depend on Instagram to do.

If you're not an Instagrammer, give it a shot. maybe it'll speak to you the way it has to me.

Here are ten photos from the last couple of months that have made it onto my personal favorites list. If you click on my name, the link will jump you to my Instagram profile page. Follow me and I'll follow you back.

All of the photos in my stream are available for purchase as either a hi-res file or as a 6"x6" or a 12"x12" print. Shoot me an e-mail if you're interested.

23 September 2013

Lights! Camera! Blanco!

Recently, I had the good fortune to visit my friends and colleagues at Blanco on the set of a photo and video shoot. The folks from Blanco's marketing department is working on the catalog shots and video footage they'll use when they roll out a new campaign in a couple of months.


While I was on set I saw some old favorites and a lot of new stuff I can't talk about. But brace yourselves.

Listen, I get it that many people's eyes glaze over when I start gushing about innovations in sink design. But think about it. What component do you use more than any other in your kitchen? The smart money's on you answering "the sink." So why not spend some time considering this heavily utilized and underappreciated feature in every kitchen?

Blanco does that and more. Every aspect of how people use their products is thought through and and analyzed. Their research informs their finished designs to an alarming, though understated way.

For example, on most flat bottomed stainless sinks the sink walls and the sink floor meet each other at a sharp, 45-degree angle. You know what you can't do with a sharp 45-degree angle at the bottom of a sink? That's right, you can't clean it very easily. On a Blanco flat bottom sink, the joints between the sinks walls, sides and floor meet at a gentle, 10mm radius. You know what the average radius of a human being's index finger is? That's right, 10mm.

Flat bottomed steel sinks such as Blanco Precision™ Sinks are engineered around the dimensions of the human body to make them easier to clean.


Another great example is from my favorite sink in the universe, the Blanco Modex™. The drainboard built into this sink is pitched in two directions (backward and toward the sink) so water can't get anywhere but down the drain. That's more solid thought expended on a sink that makes it easier to use and live with.

While I'm gushing over the Modex, here's a video that 'splains it all:


As cool as the Modex is, just wait'll you see the new stuff Blanco has coming.

My on set visit with Blanco took place at the Shadowlight Group and I was absolutely blown away by their skills and their facility. Have a product you want to have photographed or filmed? Give them a call.

As always, it was great to see my friends from Blanco. I'm fortunate to know first hand that with a company like Blanco, I know that the great products they produce are backed by some of my favorite people in the industry.

14 June 2012

Architecture Thursday: Renée and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall

Two weeks ago, I was treated to a tour of the Segerstrom Center for the Arts in Costa Mesa, California. There are few things I appreciate about a city more than an obvious commitment to the arts, and Costa Mesa has that commitment in spades.

The Segerstom Center for the Arts is a campus of buildings dedicated to the best humanity has to offer. The theater and original hall were spectacular of course, but it was the Renée and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall that impressed me the most.

©RMA Photography Inc. - 714.259.1332

Lord knows I love a curtain wall, but to see a glass curtain wall made from undulating glass was something I never thought was possible.

The concert hall opened on September 15, 2006 and the architect was Cesar Pelli from Pelli, Clark, Pelli and Associates in New Haven, CT.

Once inside, the building continued to amaze. Here are some photos from the lobby and grand staircase.

©RMA Photography Inc. - 714.259.1332

Looking up at the lobby ceiling. 
©RMA Photography Inc. - 714.259.1332

The docents who led the tour kept saying that the acoustics inside the auditorium were spectacular and part of me thought that no building this grand could have as great a concert hall in it as the docents claimed. I was wrong. Here's looking at the main stage.

©RMA Photography Inc. - 714.259.1332

And here's the view from the stage toward the back of the house.

©Doug Gifford Photography

When we were touring the Concert Hall, we were fortunate to stumble upon a children's concert being performed by the Pacific Symphony and yes, the acoustics are every bit as perfect as the docents claimed.

Our small group stood in one of the upper tiers and just let the music wash over us. Nothing affects me the way a symphony orchestra does. Nothing. Standing in a truly grand concert hall while that orchestra's performing is my idea of heaven on earth.

If you live in Orange County, consider yourself to be fortunate indeed. In a time when arts organizations all over the world are facing threats like extinction, it was beyond affirming to see that the opposite is happening in Costa Mesa.

Thank you again goes to Blanco and Bosch, you sure know how to show a guy a good time, especially when my definition of a good time revolves around classical music.

If you live anywhere near Costa Mesa, buy tickets and go see some performances. Here's the link to the Segerstom Center for the Arts website. Go!

11 March 2012

Anthroplogie continues to offend

I walked past an Anthropologie store in New Orleans this week and was mortified to see their store windows decked out in some bad reproductions of Mark Rothko's work and they were calling it and their new collection as "Abstract Expressionism."

I can sense that Rothko would have been mortified by not only his being classified as an Abstract Expressionist, let alone being the pivot point of a marketing ploy to sell overpriced, unattractive crap. Rothko was a Russian emigre whose family fled the last gasps of the Czarist pograms as the Bolsheviks conducted a bloody coup over the Romanov autocracy. He and his family barely escaped Russia with their clothes on their backs.

The Rothko family was fortunate to escape while they could and so they ended up in New York and then later moved onto the Pacific Northwest.

The Rothkos (nee Rothkowitz) family suffered mightily. They were poor but they managed to keep it together despite their circumstances. By all accounts, Mark Rothko was brilliant and he ended up at Yale.

In the 1930s he started to paint, and his subjects shifted from the Cubist/ Primitivist styles of his contemporaries to something utterly new. By the time the 1950s rolled around he was breaking new ground with a perspective that came to be called "multiforms." These multiforms were in essence individual photons of light, the smallest part of an artistic vision. Take a look at these paintings and imagine what he was looking at when he painted them.





That imagining is the whole point of Rothko's work. It makes me want to look at the parts that make up everything. No one had ever painted that way before and he pioneered the very thought of a pixel. He was painting in the 1950s something many of us take for granted now.

So what does any of this have to do with Anthropologie? Nothing, that's what. How do the get from this great, thoughtful art to this thing?




This sofa's offensive because it's hideous for starters. It's doubly offensive for its $3200 price tag. What makes it trebly offensive is Anthropologie's attempts to sell this crap off the back of Mark Rothko.

Don't buy into it. An ugly sofa is an ugly sofa, despite the marketing hoo-hah that surrounds it. There is nothing about a sofa with that price tag that harkens back to anything but bad taste. Enough, enough, enough.

I have no problem with $3200 sofas, provided they're well made and look like something other than a trail of cat sick. But asking people to spend that kind of money on a piece of furniture that's purposefully ugly and is being hawked by using one of the greatest minds of the 20th Century is just plain wrong.

What do you think? Would a sofa that looks like this and with this kind of back story ever figure into your home?

14 December 2011

Scandinavian Made, a webshop

I think I'm in love with this bowl.


Ceramicist Simon Koefoed made only one and it's available through a new webshop called Scandinavian Made.

Scandinavian Made is the brainchild of my brilliant friend Susan Serra and her daughter Kelly Serra Donovan. The Serra women's roots run deep in Denmark and Susan's long made it a habit to bring back handmade items she found on her annual trips to Denmark for her design clients.

With the recent launch of Scandinavian Made, anybody can benefit from Susan's discerning eye and love of her ancestral homeland. Here are some highlights I just pulled from her site.





There's a definite eye at work here and the whole site is a testament to her good taste and willingness to share the one-of-kind, hand crafted vases, bowls, servicewear, wall hangings and more that she finds on her travels.

Susan's one of the most generous and talented women I know and it's a pleasure to help introduce Scandinavian Made to the world. Give Scandinavian Made a look and tell Susan I sent you.

12 December 2011

Christmas in New York

On the upper east side of Midtown Manhattan, on the corner of Fifth Avenue and East 50th Street, sits one of the world's most iconic department stores, Sak's Fifth Avenue.


Despite the fact that Sak's has grown into a department store chain, their 1924 building across the street from Rockefeller Center remains their flagship.

Christmas is a big deal in New York, obviously. Every year Sak's rises to the occasion and rolls out a display that integrates their historic facade.

Last year, their night time display broke new ground in projected animation with their story of "The Snowflake and the Bubble." I remember standing on the West Side of Fifth Avenue on a Friday night in mid-December last year and being blown away.




I figured that they'd spent so much money on that animation that they'd use it for a couple of years.

Clearly, I underestimated Sak's. Two weeks ago they rolled out "The Snowflake and the Bubble: The Sequel."




I don't think I'm going to make it up there before the display ends on January 6th, 2012 but this new animation makes me want to drop what I'm doing and just get on an airplane.

01 December 2011

I love New York so much it hurts sometimes; the Delancy Street "Low Line"

This is the Williamsburg Bridge.


It connects the Lower East Side of Manhattan with Mid Brooklyn and on its Brooklyn side, it marks the start of the Brooklyn Queens Expressway. On the Manhattan side, The Williamsburg  crosses over Roosevelt Drive and what appear to be endless housing blocks.


The approach to the Williamsburg is Delancey Street, a pretty non-descript patch of well-traveled road that looks like the rest of the Lower East Side.


 However, underneath Delancey is an abandoned rail yard.


It's but one of countless abandoned rail yards in Manhattan and it always amazes me that the city with the most expensive real estate values in the US has so many under utilized nooks and crannies.

A couple of years ago, an abandoned, elevated railway was turned into New York's now-legendary High Line. However, a couple of forward thinkers have an similar idea for the Delancey Street only instead of a High Line, they've come up with the idea that's come to be known as the Low Line.

The Delancy Underground is its official name and at this point it's in the process of raising money to make the dream a reality. I remember when the High Line was in a similar situation and just look at it now. I have no doubt that the Delancey Underground will happen and based on the speed of the High Line's development and conversion, it will happen pretty quickly.

However, the Delancey Underground is very different from the High Line, primarily because it's underground. However, the plan for the Delancey calls for a host of sky lights, solar collectors and fiber optics to bring the light of day underground. The light levels underneath Delancey Street will be intense enough for trees, shrubs, flowers and grasses to grow. check out these renderings.







It's going to be amazing and if any city in the world can pull this off, New York's definitely the one. No where else in the world can mount projects on the scale New York can and nowhere else on earth can channel ambition and vision the way New York does so regularly.

Man I love that town and the Delancey Underground is one more reason to hold it in as high a regard as I do.

New Yorkers aside, what public space initiatives has your city undertaken? Are publicly-funded, public spaces important and worthwhile? Talk to me about this stuff.


29 November 2011

Real design stars and a concrete counter guy

During my travels last fall, I had some incredible opportunities to meet some people whose work in the design world I admire greatly.

Everything started at Cersaie in Bologna last September. Endless thanks to Chris Abbate, Novita Public Relations and Tile of Italy for making it possible for me to meet and talk with some people whose work I've long admired.

In order of appearance, I met Patricia Uriquiola,


Philippe Grohe


and the Bouroullec brothers, Ronan and Erwan, all in the same day.


I've written about these peoples' work quite a bit over the years. I shower with a shower that Ms. Uriquiola designed and Mr. Grohe brought to the market. It was great to be able to tell them how much I appreciate their vision and hard work in person.

Later in London for BlogTour 2011, I met such notables as Nicky Haslam,


Barbara Barry


and Lee Broom.


There were more people whose work I admire during those weeks on the road but I don't want to be too much of a name dropper. BlogTour 2011 dropped me into the middle of the London Design Festival and were it not for BlogTour I'd have never been there otherwise. So thank you.

But out of the entire who's who of the world design scene I met, none can compare to a man I had the pleasure to meet in San Francisco last month.

I'd been brought to San Francisco by Zephyr to attend a design event at their spectacular showroom in San Francisco's Design District. One of the night's speakers was Fu-Tung Cheng, the man who brought the decorative and functional possibilities of concrete to the world's attention.


There were at most 30 people in attendance at Zephyr's event and most of us knew one another. It felt more like a dinner party than it did a formal function.

After Fu-Tung spoke, he mingled with the everyone as if he were just another guest at a party. Never mind that there was a stack of his books by the door.

Here's a little back story. In 2002, Fu-Tung Cheng published his first book, Concrete Countertops; Design, Form and Finishes for the New Kitchen and Bath. I was a relative newbie to the kitchen and bath industry then and his book was nothing short of a revelation. It gave rise to a new aesthetic in my work but far more than that, his first book showed me that I could forge my own way and that I could create a career for myself. All I needed to do was channel my passion and my energy as tirelessly as I was able.

Concrete Countertops was far more than a book about a new idea in surfaces, it was a wake up call for me and it challenged me to strike out and make a place for myself in the world. Fu-Tung Cheng's generous spirit jumped off the page as I read his words and I realized that my making a place for myself wasn't a matter of my ambition. A career of my own making could only happen if I could be of service and use to other people.

Part of me knew that already, but Cheng's book about concrete drove home that point and sent me on my way. I'm not kidding when I say that his first book changed the trajectory of my life.

Fast forward to October, 2011 and I found myself in the same room with the man who'd had such an impact on me. I walked up to him and told him essentially what I just wrote in the previous few paragraphs. He was as gracious as he was grateful to hear that he'd impacted me so positively.

We ended up having a longer conversation and later, exchanging business cards when the event was breaking up for the night. And in a final gesture, he inscribed his latest book, Concrete at Home for me.

I'm a fortunate, fortunate man. I say that all the time and I mean it. I have opportunities extended to me on a regular basis that make my head spin, not the least of which are numerous opportunities to meet some of the  people I admire. So thanks Zephyr for a great event and thanks for allowing me to complete another circle.

08 August 2011

Open Source meets design

Ronen Kadushin is a Berlin-based industrial designer who's onto something he calls Open Design.

Through Open Design, Kadushin distributes his household objects under a Creative Commons license. Anything you see in the Open Design catalog can be downloaded and recreated, shared and owned by anybody who adheres to the agreements spelled out in Creative Commons.

Creative Commons holds that anything made available through it can be used by anybody so long as the originator gets credit for his or her work. This website is published under a Creative Commons license and it's something I support wholeheartedly.

I'd always thought of Creative Commons as it relates to internet content and I think it's exciting that a highly-regarded industrial designer is distributing chairs and lamps to the world through it.

All you need is AutoCAD and access to a CNC router and you can have any of the items in the Open Design catalog. Just download the .dxf file and you're ready to go.

I'm fascinated by this idea of course, but Kadushin seems to have included something in his Open Design catalog that's intended to be a lure for me specifically. Here it is.


Does it look familiar? It ought to.

It's a light fixture based on the centerpiece of Picasso's Guernica. Click on this photo to expand the painting.


Guernica is the first painting I ever studied and through it I learned just about everything I know now about art appreciation.

Pablo Picasso painted Guernica for the Paris Expo in 1937. It was his response to the German and Italian bombing of the Basque village of Guernica at 4:30 in the afternoon on a market day. The men, women and children killed that day were innocent civilians and Picasso's painting drew worldwide attention to the bloodbath that was the Spanish Civil War.

In the years since 1937, Picasso's Guernica has become an emblem of the futility of war and the unacceptable toll it takes on innocent civilians. It's one of the most profound pacifist statements of the 20th Century. Look past the Cubist conventions Picasso used in this painting and read a bit about what he's saying.

As an interesting and nearly unknown aside, the estate of Nelson Rockefeller commissioned a tapestry replica of Guernica for the United Nations. From 1985 through 2009 it hung in the UN's headquarters in New York. However in February 2003, when Colin Powell arrived to make the case for the US's invasion of Iraq, the tapestry was covered by a blue tarp so that it wouldn't be the backdrop when he appeared on camera to address the press.

It's since been placed on permanent loan to the Whitechapel Gallery in London. Presumably so as not to embarrass any more war-mongers.

Anyhow, check out Ronen Kadushin's entire Open Design catalog. If you have access to a CNC machine, I'd love to see some results of your downloads. If you find yourself short of a CNC, you can buy Kadushin's stuff already made at Movisi.