What impressed us was the speed of progress. When we were in Chicago at the end of June, the city launched its own bike share scheme. New York already has one. The docking stations bring tangible cycle infrastructure to the city streets. In-carriage and separated cycle routes have begun to proliferate. Disused railway lines are being harnessed as leisure trails, and in some cases these were working well for commuters too. Indianapolis had recently completed their “Cultural Trail,” an active transportation loop linking the five central city districts.

However, the real question is: will cycling actually change the city? Will it result in new urban forms or, as the title of Australian academic Dr Steven Fleming’s new book predicts, a “Cycle Space”? Like Fleming, I believe so. I believe that cycling might just be the catalyst for a 21st Century urban renaissance.

The 2010 launch of the “Boris Bike” - 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.

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.

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.

But why is retrospective accreditation important? And if it is getting better, do we need to keep talking about it?

Last week, the Freer débuted a temporary reinstallation of the Peacock Room, by the curator Lee Glazer, which re-creates the way it appeared in photographs from 1908—adorned not with the porcelains (Leyland’s collection was long gone by then) but with two hundred and fifty-four of Freer’s own Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Middle Eastern earthenware and stoneware ceramics, which he left to the museum. For two years, they will replace the room’s usual, limited number of blue-and-white pieces similar to Leyland’s. The effect is wonderful.

Whistler’s room anticipates Art Nouveau, but without that style’s rote longueurs. Credit Photograph by JOHN TSANTES / COURTESY FREER GALLERY OF ART, SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION In 1876-77, James McNeill Whistler altered the décor of the London dining room of his patron Frederick Leyland, a Liverpool shipowner who used the room’s wall shelves to display his vast collection of blue-and-white Chinese porcelains. A mania for things Asian raged in England then, in concert with the aestheticist movement—a reaction, exalting unalloyed beauty, against the moralistic constraints of Victorian taste. Whistler was the trend’s leading light. The result was one of the most intoxicating decorative ensembles in the world: “Harmony in Blue and Gold: The Peacock Room,” which, since 1923, has been the star attraction of the Freer Gallery, a museum rich in Asian and Islamic art, in Washington, D.C. Charles Lang Freer, an American railroad-car manufacturer and globe-trotting connoisseur, bought the room, after Leyland’s death, from a London dealer, in 1904, and had it installed at his home, in Detroit. Upon Freer’s death, in 1919, his will endowed the Freer Gallery, which opened, four years later, as the first of the Smithsonian art museums. Last week, the Freer débuted a temporary reinstallation of the Peacock Room, by the curator Lee Glazer, which re-creates the way it appeared in photographs from 1908—adorned not with the porcelains (Leyland’s collection was long gone by then) but with two hundred and fifty-four of Freer’s own Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Middle Eastern earthenware and stoneware ceramics, which he left to the museum. For two years, they will replace the room’s usual, limited number of blue-and-white pieces similar to Leyland’s. The effect is wonderful. Leyland and his wife, Frances, championed Whistler in England. (She is the subject of my favorite of his paintings, “Symphony in Flesh Color and Pink,” from 1871-74, which is now in the Frick.) Their dining room was already superb. The gifted architect and designer Thomas Jeckyll had lined it with latticed walnut shelving, in a style that was notionally Oriental, to accommodate Leyland’s porcelains, and had hung, over the fireplace, his early Whistler painting of a celebrated beauty of the day, Christina Spartali, as “The Princess from the Land of Porcelain” (1864-65). Leyland agreed to pay Whistler a thousand guineas to emend Jeckyll’s scheme, but later, unconvinced of the job’s worth, he delivered the sum in the lesser denomination of pounds. Whistler, infuriated, then painted a satirical mural, in the finished room, representing the artist and his patron as warring peacocks. The Leyland bird is pompous and hectoring, with a breast of gold and platinum coins, windmilling wings, and an immense explosion of tail feathers; the Whistler bird poignantly droops, raising one wing in feeble defense. Leyland lived with this burlesque until his death, in 1892, but his relationship with Whistler had ended in 1879—as had his marriage to Frances, perhaps partly owing to her at least emotional closeness to the artist. Further ancient gossip holds that Thomas Jeckyll was driven mad by Whistler’s overhaul of his design, but it seems that the architect’s mental illness was organic. (He died in an asylum, in 1881.) Where Jeckyll had envisioned a sun-dappled Chinese pavilion—with walls covered in embossed and floral-patterned, bright-yellow leather—Whistler contrived a chamber of the night. 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. The whole plainly anticipates Art Nouveau, but without that style’s rote longueurs. It realizes a synesthetic fusion of dazzling spectacle and intimate touch, evoking music and something like a subliminal, ambrosial perfume. Seeing the room as the reinstallation was being completed, with the shutters open, I got to gauge the impact when they were closed. It was like the onset of a deep bass chord out of Wagner. Illuminated by eight pendant ceiling fixtures (which I wish could be gaslights again, as they were in 1877), the room seemed at once to fall asleep and to come fully alert, vividly dreaming.

n 1876-77, James McNeill Whistler altered the décor of the London dining room of his patron Frederick Leyland, a Liverpool shipowner who used the room’s wall shelves to display his vast collection of blue-and-white Chinese porcelains. A mania for things Asian raged in England then, in concert with the aestheticist movement—a reaction, exalting unalloyed beauty, against the moralistic constraints of Victorian taste. Whistler was the trend’s leading light.