Reading Room

Contemporary World Interiors (Introduction)

Introduction from Contemporary World Interiors, published by Phaidon in 2007

Can the Kindle really improve on the book?
I ordered a Kindle 2 from Amazon. How could I not? There were banner ads for it all over the Web. Whenever I went to the Amazon Web site, I was urged to buy one. “Say Hello to Kindle 2,” it said, in tall letters on the main [...]

Ur Jordan

I am towering above Michael Jordan. I am staring down at him. I stand, he sits on a gymnasium floor. He looks disconsolate. I am uneasy. That is because I have to tell him my editors have delayed the story I’ve been working on for months. It is 1986 and during his second season in [...]

The Beauty of a Park

“The park should, as far as possible, complement the town. Openness is the one thing you cannot get in buildings. Picturesqueness you can get. Let your buildings be as picturesque as your artists can make them. This is the beauty of a town. Consequently, the beauty of a park should be the other.”
Frederick Law Olmsted, [...]

Trump, The Logo

The first plans for Trump Tower were drawn in secret, late in the 1970’s. Der Scutt, the building’s architect, devised a saw-toothed, gleaming dark bronze glass tower that was to be constructed on the site of the old Bonwit Teller department store on Fifth Avenue in New York City. The secrecy, uncharacteristic of Donald Trump, [...]

Compulsion: Where Object Meets Anxiety

My brother stood in the kitchen, staring at a stool. It was where he always sat. Having not visited home in a while, I was unaccustomed to his new habits and placed my purse on the stool. Following my brother’s intense line of vision, I realized my error and lunged for the purse. I carried [...]

How Much is That Artifact in the Window?

Many of us have bought design objects for pleasure and/or scholarship. We’ve paid varying amounts—high and low. But what or who determines the value of a design artifact. Is it simply supply and demand or some curiously abstract idea of worth? I recently found reference on the web to something I edited many years ago [...]

That’s the Ticket

Chances are, any numbered ticket you’ve ever touched—at the movies, train station, or even in line at the bakery counter—emerged from a machine invented by Reuben Harry Helsel of Long Island City, Queens. A tall, good-looking man with piercing hazel eyes, Helsel did not complete high school. Yet between 1917 and 1962 he patented and [...]

Harley Earl’s Expansive American Dream

There are many ways to look at cars, but it is difficult to get people to really look at them as an amalgam of design decisions and stylistic tools that deal with what is an essentially awkward form. While he might have found such analysis by amateurs annoying and best left to professionals like himself, [...]