Category: reviews
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Earthquakes, Mudslides, Fires & Riots: California & Graphic Design, 1936–1986
“MONOTONE DOES NOT signal class (at least in Southern California),” writes designer Lorraine Wild in Louise Sandhaus’s recent survey Earthquakes, Mudslides, Fires & Riots: California & Graphic Design, 1936–1986. Wild’s observation, like many others in this captivating, dayglo-jacketed book, celebrates a visual history of an environment that seems to counter the stringent, sometimes monotone rules of…
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Competing Utopias: Modern Design on Both Sides of the Iron Curtain
“I always thought of the [Soviet] East in black-and-white, and the West in color,” says filmmaker Bill Ferehawk. He is one of six curators of the installation “Competing Utopias,” which puts this preconception to the test by placing furniture and objects from the Wende Museum and Archive of the Cold War into the rooms of…
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Designed for Impact: Saul Bass
Even if you haven’t heard of Saul Bass, you know his work. From the poster for Hitchcock’s Vertigo and the shower scene in Psycho to the logos for AT&T and Quaker Oats to the humble, cheerful Dixie cup, Bass’s designs have become emblems of midcentury style and a ubiquitous part of our visual culture. A new hefty, lushly illustrated book…
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Review: Everything Loose Will Land
“Tip the world over on its side, and everything loose will land in Los Angeles,” said Frank Lloyd Wright. He was referring to the city’s salmagundi of building styles, but a fascinating exhibition at the MAK Center for Art and Architecture at the Schindler House has repurposed the phrase. It looks at LA’s architecture and art from the…
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Moshe Safdie: A Retrospective
We begin with Habitat, Moshe Safdie’s revolutionary prefab housing constructed for the 1967 Montreal World Expo. His first completed design of 85 projects and counting, it is an exhilarating opening for a retrospective, and a lucky one – how many young architects get their thesis project built, and featured at a global expo? Habitat’s fractal…
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Ball Nogues’ Yucca Crater in the Desert
Heading east out of the tiny town of 29 Palms, in southern California’s Mojave Desert, the two-lane road cuts through miles of flat land. After a 20-minute drive through this monotonous landscape, a dirt road turns off to the left. There, looming incongruously, is a large wooden cone with a skin of scaffolding rising out…
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Images from the Stasi Archives
Simon Menner’s new book Top Secret: Images from the Stasi Archives examines the vast collection of information and photos once gathered by the East German secret police. While coincidental, the timing couldn’t be better as news about the NSA surveillance program continues to dominate headlines. “I had come to realize that the public has very…
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Playa Vista Bandshell by Michael Maltzan
By day it’s a brilliant white turban, or a scoop of ice cream hollowed out; by night it glows like a Japanese lantern, afloat in a dark sea of grass. Michael Maltzan’s bandshell is an astonishingly light affair, a sheet of canvas stretched over a dramatic curve of scaffolding that Maltzan likens to “bones set…
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Weegee’s Naked Hollywood
“Hollywood is Newark, New Jersey, with Palm Trees,” quipped Arthur Fellig, the prolific and fearless photographer of America’s underbelly who was known as Weegee—like the ouija board—for his uncanny ability to be in the right place at the right time. After selling the film rights to Naked City, his best-selling book of gritty crime scenes…
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Seismic Shift: Lewis Baltz, Joe Deal and California Landscape Photography, 1944-1984
Joe Deal, reflecting on his landscape photographs of the early 1970s, wrote: “Why contribute, I reasoned, to the growing pile of photographs of an idealized American landscape while it was being chewed up before our eyes by advancing suburban development, interstate highways and shopping malls?” Deal’s sentiments were shared by a new school of Southern California-based…
Lyra Kilston 