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Observatory

Amelia Lacy

Gene & Jackie Lacy

Strains of Stan Kenton’s music fill a large, open studio in the Merchants Bank building in downtown Indianapolis. Simple white linen curtains are pushed away from the room’s tall windows; wide Venetian blinds have been pulled open to reveal the growing city below. Gauguin, Picasso and Mondrian prints cover the walls. Around the studio, perched at drawing boards, are eight designers, illustrators and typographers creating the designs that will soon become ads and logos for such corporations as Weimer Typesetting, American United Life Insurance Company (AUL) and Eli Lilly & Company.

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Rick Poynor

The Strange Afterlife of Common Objects

The pictures shown here were taken last week in a shop called The Works: “Objects of Desire” in the Çukurcuma district of Istanbul. No matter how seasoned you may be as a browser of junk shops, quirky antique dealers and flea markets, The Works is one of the great rococo emporiums of bric-a-brac. In shops like these, Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk found the objects for his newly opened Museum of Innocence.

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Mark Lamster

The War Against Sixties Architecture

A few days ago news broke that, absent some last-minute stay, John Johansen's Mummers Theater in Oklahoma City will face demolition. This comes on the heels of a report, just a week earlier, that Johansen's Mechanic Theater in Baltimore is also slated for destruction. It would be a crime to lose them.

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Rob Walker

Managing Digital Durability

Digital things can seem definitively less durable than physical ones, but that's misleading. In reality, digital stuff can linger on both by design, and by default. The question becomes: How to deal with that? This stuff is already here; maybe it can be made to be here in a better way.

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The Editors

Our Mothers, Our Selves

Last year, we shared designers' baby pictures: this year, we're honoring mothers themselves — your mothers, with you.

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Alexandra Lange

The Mother of Us All

Reyner Banham wasn't cowed by many, but even he was nervous about meeting Esther McCoy. As Banham wrote, "Until about 1960, the rest of the world had practically no idea at all about architecture in California... Then this extraordinary book came out in 1960, and — suddenly — California architecture had heroes, history, and character." A new book of McCoy's writings has just been published, and you should get it.

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Bill Moran

Hamilton Wood Type and Printing Museum

When you arrive in the city of Two Rivers, Wisconsin you discover a smokestack of epic proportions. Measuring fourteen stories with 6-foot-tall brick letters that spell Hamilton — a 200-foot-tall sign for the Hamilton Wood Type foundry built in 1880 on the western shore of Lake Michigan. The center of the city is still dominated by warehouses and manufacturing plants that date back to the 1890s. Because the craft of making wood type and wood cabinetry generated so much sawdust, the company still uses it to heat its entire six block complex.

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John Foster

Accidental Mysteries, 05.06.12

Accidental Mysteries, a weekly cabinet of visual curiosities curated by John Foster, highlights images of design, art, architecture and ephemera brought to light by the magic of the digital age. This week's focus is nonsense diagrams.

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Rob Walker

Assignment Creativity

A recent book on "the art of the art assignment" offers a pleasing antidote to recent discourse on the subject of creativity. It's messy, open-ended, inspiring, chaotic, useful, and gave me a new appreciation for the assignment as a form.

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Julia Novitch

Public Space and the Skills of Citizenship: An Interview with Elihu Rubin

"Public spaces can be charged politically because they enable citizens to gather, to represent themselves and to transmit messages. There is also a more benign sense of public space as a place where we can just idle. And yet there are tensions in terms of belonging to those places, the right to just be in those places. How long can someone who has nowhere else to go spend time in that space? The test of a public space is its tolerance."

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Alexandra Lange

Against Kickstarter Urbanism

Kickstarter is not a popularity contest, or a democracy. Kickstarter’s founders select which projects go on the blog. Their declaration of a glorious new era for design suggests that projects that aren’t Kickstarter worthy aren’t worthy. A suitable funding platform for a watch is not a suitable funding platform for a city.

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Rick Poynor

Career Prospects in the Pain Business

I was browsing the Guardian newspaper’s recruitment ads this week when I saw this ad for a job as a Torturer. It caught me off guard — as it was meant to — and I felt a few seconds of profound shock and dismay. The three ads in the UK charity Freedom from Torture’s new awareness and fundraising campaign deliver perfectly calculated moments of cognitive dissonance.

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John Thackara

Istanbul: City of Seeds

Rather than dream up exotic visions of “what could be”, an xskool looks for social and natural assets that already exist – and grows from there. We bring together projects, however modest in scale, that meet daily life needs using the low-energy processes of natural systems, combined with the metabolic energy of social innovation. A kind of social seed exchange of the next economy.

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Mark Lamster

Another Imperiled Paul Rudolph Landmark

With so much of our focus on the potential demise of Paul Rudolph's Orange Country Government Center, in Goshen, there hasn't been much conversation on the threat to another Rudolph landmark, his Sarasota High School of 1960. A renovation plan would utterly compromise this landmark building.

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Michael Bierut

The Poster that Launched a Movement (Or Not)

The Occupy Wall Street movement, which reaches a critical moment this week, began with that most conventional of graphic forms, a poster. The trouble is, hardly anyone has ever seen it. In the age of social media, does political graphic design matter?

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