A British starchitect and the USA’s most established women’s magazine make unusual cubicle buddies.
I got an impromptu tour of Foster + Partners‘ NYC office today, from an architect friend who works there. It’s up by Central Park, in a corner of the Hearst Tower magazine empire — which Foster designed, hence the connection. It’s a bit shiny and imperialistic for my taste, but it does have incredible views.
One of my biggest projects over the last couple of years has been interviewing people in different cities about their own brand of creativity, and what it means for them to work in that city. Over the next few weeks, I’ll be posting the best of them up here, starting with Jim Garrison, the principle at the progressive Garrison Architects, who were responsible for Red Hook Green, New York’s first sustainable, zero-energy building.
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A couple of stories I wrote on that great kiwi institution, the bach, have been posted on the Australian Design Review site, including one from my favourite practice, Herbst Architects. They have a way of recreating the camping experience — setting up a half-in, half-out adaptable group of spaces with lots of air and natural light, all arranged around the food prep area (an obvious priority) — that reminds me of all the holidays my family took in our mustard-orange 1960s VW Combi in South Africa when I was little. More….
Out this week, HOME magazine’s art issue. The cover story is the first from the European trip I did at the end of last year with Emily Andrews, and features a house in France belonging to the former Auckland art dealer Anna Bibby. Also inside, the Brooklyn apartment contemporary artist Martin Basher and his partner, the TV producer Martha Jeffries, have made their home. Stay posted for more stories from the trip over the next few months….
The magazine is on newstands Monday the 6th February. BOOM.
London: Last week I met up with the talented and hilariously deadpan Phil Cuttance in his Kentish Town workshop. Emily Andrews photographed him with his new range of Faceture vases, and the hand-made roto-molding machine he’s taking to Milan as a street installation. You can see a short film of the process, here, and more of Emily’s pics of Phil after the jump. More….
South London-based Helen Friel had to create a new job description for what she does. The term “paper engineer” sounds surreal; against the images of heavy duty machinery and algorithms the word “engineer” conjures up, paper is a contradictorily throwaway presence. However, Friel’s craft-based design process, where she cuts and assembles paper to create inventive images for Tatler and Vanity Fair, and a range of commercial clients, is pretty straightforward.
Indesign just put up my news piece on Auckland’s new Tank Farm development — incidentally, it’s just down the road from my house. Quite exciting to see the city getting something actually quite large and bold in terms of urban redevelopment, without too much politicking or getting bogged down in micro turf wars. The landscape programme is rumoured to be “very High Line” too. Intriguing. I’m interested to see how this develops and becomes integrated into urban life over the next few years.
To paraphrase an old comedian, a funny thing happened on the way between my station on the dining table, the fridge and the radio the other day. More….
Where Women Live in Fear
Last year, I visited the Solomon Islands on a field trip run by Family Planning International, in order to cover the unbelievably low status of women in the country. A particularly toxic climate of religion, village tradition and lawlessness has created a culture in which a woman’s most basic human rights, including her sexual and reproductive rights, count for next to nothing. I’ve been working on several reports from the trip, and the first is running in the April issue of Metro magazine, out today — follow this link to the full version. It’s not a pleasant read, but it would be nice to think that a greater awareness of the situation could bring some pressure to bear on Pacific leaders, whose response to date has been the political equivalent of putting your fingers in your ears and singing tunelessly to block out accusations of corruption, self-interest and just plain old apathy.