counternotions

Stone Doorknocker

What’s most naturally appealing about this modern work of art is that it gets the conversation going even before guests open your front door. Stainless steel envelops and plate-backs a sensuous, one-of-a-kind river rock. Sample shown is representative, although each stone will have its own unique, contemporary look. Handmade. Also makes a memorable housewarming gift for the new home or condo owner in your life.

As brilliant as it gets, for something so non-essential.

» Via Design Milk.

Do Not Enter

Somehow the two pictures on this page must be related, no?

» Via Monoscope.

National Design Week is upon us (Oct 14- 20). In celebration, you too can vote for Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum’s “People’s Design Awards” online. There are currently 202 nominees and you can nominate your own as well. Voting ends Oct 16.

At Slate, Witold Rybczynski has a nice slideshow In Praise of the Anti-Icon:

Painter Paul Klee once wrote that while painters could make wheels square, architects had to make them round. Not any more. In the past, public and institutional buildings were expected to convey a sense of solidity and order; today they can just as easily suggest collapse and disharmony. In his forthcoming book, Architecture of the Absurd, John Silber takes aim at architects such as Frank Gehry, Steven Holl, and Daniel Libeskind, who, in a desire to create iconic architecture, frequently make their wheels square.

No article that has this gem from Robert Venturi (with whom I interned in Philadelphia a long time ago) could be uninteresting:

“It is all right to decorate construction but never construct decoration.”

This is exactly why I never take on a design project if I’m not in charge of the architecture as well. Because, in the end, design doesn’t add value, it creates it. Architecture is what frames the problem space for design.

Sometimes I’m ambivalent about what frames Frank Gehry’s architecture.

On a gorgeous fall afternoon while visiting the old school, I stopped by the Yale Center for British Art. I had read about Jem Southam’s Upton Pyne exhibit last week in the New York Times: Capturing a Landscape That Won’t Stand Still.

Southam is a noted landscape photographer, in the tradition of Constable and Wordsorth. Here’s how the Upton Pyne project was described in Art Forum when earlier it was at the Robert Mann gallery:

Bicycling through the countryside northwest of Exeter one day in the summer of 1996, Southam happened upon a brackish pond choked with algae and trash located behind someone’s house–and knew he had found his next subject. After photographing it in this state, he returned that December to encounter an entirely different scene: a much larger body of clear water now surrounded by tufts of planted greenery. On the visits that ensued over the next few years, Southam captured the area’s various stages of development: Tall grasses appear, as well as a little boat; finally the pond is practically a lake, met and encircled by the sweeping lawn of the house. The final shot of the series unexpectedly shows a wide swath of muddy farmyard. Evidently the pond was plowed under. 

I had no idea just how powerful the work would prove to be in person.

There were 21 photographs. Large. Still. Disturbing. As the eyes move from one photograph to another, details are lost. Time moves on. Yet there’s hope…planted in newly emerging details.

Initially the volunteer restorer of the pond doesn’t come through. According to Southam: “the bloke up the road had run off with the pond-caretaker’s wife and he was using the fixing of the pond to try to fix up his life. It didn’t work. He was quite inept, and the pond was a mess, after three years.” All’s not lost, however. Miraculously, the pond comes back at the hands of a couple of different villagers. Herons and kingfishers return to what was once a mining dump.

Jem Southam: Upton Pyne is an invitation to “re-examine notions of meaning and beauty in the landscape.” In that it’s brilliant. Non-chronological presentation and lack of signage for each photo or overall guidance by the curator were seen by some as diminishing the impact of the exhibit. Perhaps. I was blown away by the sheer size, stillness and detail of the compositions.

The exhibit is open until the end of the year.