House Rules – Introduction
A 1958 Corvette, one of the last models designed by the line’s visionary creator, Harley Earl. No design product is more quintessentially American than a first generation Corvette. Much of its appeal lies in just how little it puts between its occupants and the road and open air. It is as much about the...Continue reading→
Windowflage, part 4
Linked Hybrid, a Beijing complex designed by Steven Holl, was completed last year. As with his Simmons Hall dormitory at MIT, Holl sets windows deeply into a uniform and pervasive grid, camouflaging them as dimples in an enveloping waffle texture that’s applied like shrink-wrap. He so accentuates the window grid that it takes on the geometric purity of abstract sculpture. Like many...Continue reading→
Windowflage, part 3
“The Loneliest Job”, an unposed 1961 photo of JFK in the Oval Office by George Tames (The New York Times) shows how a window can express individual presence and uniqueness of outlook. At a traditional domestic scale, even an empty window invokes human presence as surely as a Van Gogh painting of an empty chair or pair of shoes. If...Continue reading→
Windowflage, part 2
The architect Edward Durrell Stone built this Manhattan townhouse for himself at 13 East 64th Street in 1956. Stone’s American Embassy in New Delhi was under construction at the time of its design. He had given the embassy a similar screen to protect it from the sun, and here recycled the idea for privacy. Stone would go on using screens to...Continue reading→
Windowflage, part 1
The Coney Island Elephantine Colossus is an object lesson in the need for windowflage, the camouflaging of windows in the service of a building’s overall sculptural effect. The work of Philadelphia architect William Free, it was built in 1883-85 as a hotel and later became a brothel. In 1896, it departed this world in true Coney Island style by burning down. ...Continue reading→
The Iron Triangle, part 2 / from Kowloon Walled City to Singapore
No place in New York elicits such wonder at the retina’s capacity as the Iron Triangle. Self-contained, densely packed and eye-boggling, it is an alternate reality recalling Hong Kong’s Kowloon Walled City, demolished in 1993-4, below. Comparing the vibrancy of the Iron Triangle to the city’s canned and bland development plan for it brings to mind William Gibson’s 1993 Wired...Continue reading→