Fra Angelico

The Three Girls

“I’m not interested in designs in drawers, I’m interested in buildings,” he says.

Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA)

“I don’t like the building,” I tell Marshall. He gives me the dead eye and says, “so what?” Well, I think, if the building wasn’t flawed and problematic, why would we be having this debate? Wouldn’t Marshall be delivering a triumphant lecture instead?

“Most architectural criticism is drivel.”

Philip Cox’s

MCA’s renovation

addressed this with moveable walls.

Stairs had previously connected the floors by taking up the end portion of each level; however, now the floors are individually continuous and provide much grander visual length, with the row of galleries forming an enfilade.

From the foyer, the floors are connected by a raw and open staircase that provides cohesion while allowing an abundance of light to flood the foyers and spread inwards to the exhibition spaces.

Glenn Barkley

Wabi-Sabi

''I like instant gratification,'

Robert Esernio

lawn

The 1980's and 90's have also seen the second coming of suburban sprawl. The relentless march of American suburbs -- gobbling up farmland in Pennsylvania, encroaching on forests outside Seattle -- has made sprawl an unlikely campaign issue for Vice President Al Gore and has no doubt also spurred lawn-product sales. At the Scott Company, the country's biggest producer of lawn fertilizer, sales have skyrocketed in three years, from $228 million to $442 million.

Real lawn guys no longer call their lawn ''lawn,'' of course. ''If you're serious about your lawn, if you're an aficionado of grass, you refer to it as 'turf,' '' says Edmund Hollander, a landscape designer in Manhattan with clients in the Hamptons and other suburbs.

In the waning summer evenings of the millennium, suburban men seem as devoted to their lawns as their fathers were in the golden age of lawn maintenance, the 1950's, the era of suburban migration, the crew cut and conformity.

For some guys it's the biggest thing they own

An accountant with three children, Mr. Esernio, 40, has spent thousands of hours and tens of thousands of dollars, including a $3,500 underground sprinkler system, to recreate, in effect, a portion of the outfield at Yankee Stadium.

his is the really green, rolling, luxuriant one, the one with mowing lines like straight brush strokes up and down a fine piece of suede.

Again

Margaret Calvert

Jacqueline S. Casey

“Not enough women designers are given the recognition that they deserve,” says graphic designer Antonio Carusone. “Take for example Jacqueline S. Casey. She is primarily responsible for bringing the International Typographic Style to the US, and her work is just as brilliant as Muller-Brockmann’s, Crouwel’s, Ruder’s…. But for some reason, her name is left out most of the time.”

Hitchcock adds, “Why does design history still teach about male designers 80% more than women designers? Why do we have 80 % women in the student body (in our [RISD] department) and 80% men in the faculty?”

Design history has long overlooked women in our narrative, despite continuously having a large group of women active in the field of graphic design over the past century.

Forty or fifty years ago, the workforce was overwhelmingly a man’s world.

The National Education Association reports of 2011 estimated that 54% of all US designers in the profession are women. In the UK it is lower, although the Design Council research found that 70% of design students in the UK are women, but 60% of the industry is male. I was curious to explore the reductive process by which these female majorities dwindle.

It’s the spring of 2011 and I am sitting in History of Graphic Design, a lecture course at my design school. We are learning about the many designers and movements essential to the narrative of graphic design. Designer’s names are listed on a page, hundreds of them. It’s so subtle; I almost miss it.

It is often discussed, academically and informally, that the presence of female designers missing from the history of graphic design is a sore oversight of the profession.

Women in Graphic Design (and why we need to talk about them)

This monumental feat of engineering offers us the best precedent for the impact the bicycle might have on London or any city for that matter.

London’s cycle hire scheme, named after mayor Boris Johnson – was the clearest indication to date that cycling was no longer just for a minority of fanatics but a healthy, efficient and sustainable mode of transport that city planners wanted in their armoury.

What is striking about these parks is the positive impact they can have on their surrounding neighbourhoods,

From an architect’s perspective though, the question remains: what will Cycle cities be like?

Cycling offers us, for the first time in more than a century and a half, the chance to build an infrastructure that will bring with it significant public health improvements. In our auto-centric world, we have unprecedented levels of health problems - obesity, diabetes, etc - all associated with our sedentary lifestyles.

not just for its contribution to public health but also for its potential parallels to Cycle Space.

Of course, the fire and resulting devastation meant that much of London had to be rebuilt, and that these buildings would be brick.

The objective was to report back to the UK and London in particular on American city-cycling culture and the political initiatives that are emerging in the US.

However, the real question is: will cycling actually change the city?

“Boris Bike”

Women’s clothing

Early in the century, the first escalators were a hard sell because high-society ladies wouldn’t use them, but by the ’50s, escalators were a central feature of most department stores.

So people were talking about what a modern retail space should look like—with large-plate glass display windows, chrome hardware, and modern lighting—and that became central to what a modern department store was. In the  ’40s and the ’50s, these ideas were pushed even further, so they start to incorporate not just materials but also modern conveniences.”

which grew to 25 floors of retail space in with 11 add-ons built between the store’s opening 1911 and 1946, came close, falling just short of 2.2 million square feet.

In New York City, A.T. Stewart pioneered this new format: his eight-story, 19-department “Iron Palace” offered goods carefully curated from around the world—from clothes to carpets, toys to china—for fixed prices, meaning no haggling was necessarily. His store offered customers special services like free delivery and waiting rooms.

That is because the heroic and stupendously popular 1851 “Washington Crossing the Delaware,” familiar to generations of schoolchildren, is one of the largest paintings in the museum, measuring 21 feet wide and 12 feet high.

“It took my breath away,” Dr. Barratt said.

“It took my breath away,” Dr. Barratt said.

The frame “is a tour de force, absolutely the most creative and involved surround for a painting that I have ever seen,” Mr. Wilner, the frame expert, said.

“is one of the most frequently reproduced images in American culture,”

The amazing keynote of the Peacock Room, given its crowding with visual incident, is simplicity. Its many elements are indeed harmonic—orchestral, in effect—and resilient, as proved by the design’s unplanned hospitality to Freer’s ceramics.

He closed the room’s three sets of tall shutters, and painted them and the walls Prussian blue and resonant blue-greens, gilded the shelving, covered the neo-Gothic ribbed ceiling (nearly fourteen feet high) in overlapping petals of Dutch metal (brass oxidizing to green and gold), and filled every incidental surface with freehand abstract patterns and images of peacocks in gold and blue.

Symphony in Flesh Color and Pink

“Harmony in Blue and Gold: The Peacock Room,”

Birds of a Feather