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Launch party invitation
Kaiserin, the biannual, bilingual “magazine for boys with problems,” is celebrating the launch of issue seven with a party in Paris on Friday, January 15, at Galerie the Window 41 (open bar!). The afterparty, at nearby La Chop des Artistes, is hosted by, get this: Otto Dicks and Kebab-in-Vichy. The afterparty appears to be the inaugural installment of their new party, called Yodel Weiss. That said, I could have this all wrong: I don’t speak crazy.
image source: I.D. Magazine
The latest casualty of the print vs. web wars is venerable design magazine I.D. (not to be confused with British fashion mag i-D). I.D.’s publisher F+W Media announced Tuesday that the magazine will cease publication with its January/February 2010 issue. Published since 1954 and first known as Industrial Design, the magazine was rebranded I.D. in the 1980s to stand stand for International Design and to reflect the publication’s multi-disciplinary focus.
I.D. came to be a resource for architectural, product, fashion, and graphic designers alike, highlighting wildly conceptual designs alongside savvy coverage of the business of design. Each year I.D. published its Annual Design Review issue (click for a slideshow of last year’s winners), with a peer jury selecting the best of the year from thousands of submissions in categories such Consumer Products, Furniture, and Concepts. In Tuesday’s press release, F+W’s editorial director Gary Lynch noted that “F+W Media will continue producing the I.D. Annual Design Review… in an expanded fashion online.” Winners last year ranged from Perkins Eastman’s TKTS booth in Times Square to Carbon Design Group’s design for the Nanopoint cellTRAY Fluidics System (a tool used by scientists to study the interactions between chemicals on the molecular level), indicating the wide scope of the Annual Design Review and the broadening, which I.D. championed, of the definition of “design.”
Launching today is the Issue 7 of PIN-UP Magazine. A “magazine for architectural entertainment,” it’s an architecture magazine for people bored by architecture magazines.
PIN-UP generally features fascinating people that make design happen, rather than the designs themselves. This issue profiles giants in the field, including Shigeru Ban and Ricardo Bofill, alongside those at the edges of the establishment, like the young New York firms SO-IL and Bureau V. Editor Felix Burrichter also has a soft spot for kitsch, as evidenced by the photo essay on Fire Island’s Belvedere Guest House for Men in the new issue, and for the overlap between art and design.
Look for it at independent and specialty booksellers worldwide. In New York find it at St. Mark’s Books, the New Museum store, and Spoonbill & Sugartown in Williamsburg. Worldwide distribution and subscription info is available here.
See below for some spreads from the new issue.
Full disclosure: I am involved with the magazine, and contributed the text in the new issue on The Belvedere. I also run the magazine’s Facebook group.
GIFT IDEA | With its 800 pages covering 700 design objects, “Every Thing Design
Designed by legendary book designer Irma Boom, the tome is the catalog from a show of the same name earlier this year at Zurich’s Gestaltung Museum, but rather than an afterthought, the book holds its own as a compendium of a staggering array of print works, consumer products, fashion, and furniture from the museum’s collection.
Through images and accompanying texts, “Every Thing Design” touches on such questions such as: what is design? What determines an object’s worth? How have attitudes towards design changed in the more than 125 years of the museum’s existence? Essays by Boom, MoMA’s Paola Antonelli, London’s Royal College of Art’s Glenn Adamson and others discuss such questions, in this book which moves far beyond mere eye candy.
“Every Thing Design” certainly makes a great gift for the design lover on your list this holiday season. It can be purchased from D.A.P., Amazon
Following images from Amazon
Wegner’s Valet Chair: (L) Image courtesy of The Selby, (R) Image courtesy of iCollector
The Valet Chair is a somewhat overlooked classic of mid-20th Century design by Hans Wegner (1914-2007), the Danish designer who created some of the century’s best-known furniture. Its somewhat whimsical-seeming form is in fact quite practical: the back is shaped like a hanger to hold a jacket, and the seat flips up to hold a pair of pants and, in the trough below the seat, wallet, keys, cuff-links and what ever else may otherwise might be scattered about one’s bedroom. Wegner no doubt noticed the tendency to hang a jacket on the back of a chair and throw the day’s clothes on top (a tendency that might also offend a designer of chairs!).
Made of oak and teak with leather and brass details, the Valet Chair might indeed be a practical solution for many a masculine chamber, but the chair doesn’t come cheap. New pieces, produced by Danish furniture maker PP Møbler, start at $7,200. Vintage specimens made by Johannes Hansen, the original manufacturing firm, regularly fetch closing bids in the low five-figure range. One such original sold last year at Chicago’s Wright auction house for a cool $21,600 (the estimate was $9,000–12,000, hinting that buyers are eager for vintage Valet Chairs).
If you aren’t willing to invest quite so much for a place to throw your clothes, perhaps a better option would be Design Within Reach’s Field Chair ($65 at DWR, image source the same). Still a worthy place to toss your stuff, the stool also features wood with brass accents, but with a flexible thick leather seat and carrying strap, as this one is modeled after the portable Campaign furniture of the British Empire. Whether you’re a Colonial Brit or a city dweller short on space you’ll appreciate that this seat can be folded up and put away when not in use. It’s surprisingly comfortable as a place to perch (though not, admittedly, for longer periods of time), it will make a great extra seat when you have one too many guests at your next cocktail party. I suspect that Valet Chair owners are not quick to offer their prized possession as an extra seat in a pinch!
More information on new Valet Chair can be found at PP Møbler. It can be purchased in the U.S. from dkVogue. More information on the Field Chair is at Design Within Reach.
Image courtesy of Storefront for Art and Architecture
On Pike Place between Division Street and East Broadway in New York City’s Chinatown, a robot is hard at work building what is being billed as the first full-scale, on-site digitally fabricated projects in the U.S. Pike Loop, an architectural installation by Zürich-based architects Gramazio & Kohler in partnership with the Faculty of Architecture at ETH Zürich and Storefront for Art & Architecture, combines technology often used in architecture and industrial design to quickly build prototypes of a final product with robotic fabrication methods used in the automotive and other precision industries. The difference here is that the so-called prototype is in fact the final product, and the fabrication is done not in a factory but on the spot.