1950s Consumer Panacea
Posted in Discourse on Wed Sep 27, 06 by Kyle under Midcentury Modern and Film-Video.
A couple of posts back I looked at the concept of postalgia, a yearning for the future that never came to pass and presented a futuristic marketing film featuring an idealized panoply of mid-century modern goods and environs. In contemporary times midcentury modern design is often now considered as being emblematic of a clutter-free, pristine, meditative, and elegant era and existence. I have always thought that this was a curious characterization.
In my mind, albeit not having experienced it myself, the 50s was the decade when the tide towards the culture of consumerism and delight in acquisition of “stuff” was at its most eagerly accepted and heartfelt peak…
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Ornamental Design Media Blitzkreig
Posted in Discourse on Thu Sep 21, 06 by Kyle under 19th Century and Decorative Arts.
If the New York Times says it, and no-one on Apartment Therapy listens can it still be true? After nearly a century of egregious contempt from high-style minded critics it looks as if the century that brought us the domestic use of electricity, the telephone, the bicycle, photography, film, the recording of sound, canned food, flush toilets, large scale public transportation, the study of psychology, department stores, metal and glass as structural building materials, and pre-perforated cross-stitch cards may finally be getting some serious attention in regards to its aesthetic output.
If you didn’t see it, the New York Times published a little missive headlined After Midcentury Modern, What’s Old Looks New today contemplating the future of trends in the high end design and antiques collecting market…
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Pamphlet Architecture contest
Posted in Discourse on Tue Sep 19, 06 by Kyle under Architecture and Books.
If you’ve not heard about it I’d like to take a moment to introduce you to the Princeton Architectural Press’s Pamphlet Architecture contest. This contest is a chance for emerging architects or architectural scholars to have their visionary and innovative ideas published by a well regarded architectural press. The contest website sums it up best:
Founded in 1977 as an alternative to mainstream architectural publishing, Pamphlet Architecture encourages architects and writers to put forth their ideas, theories, and designs in modest, affordable booklets. Its success is legendary: Pamphlet Architecture helped launch the careers of architects from Steven Holl and Lebbeus Woods to Zaha Hadid, and has influenced far exceeding the ad-hoc nature of these humble books.
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Brocade Home Catalog Arrives
Posted in Discourse on Mon Sep 18, 06 by Kyle under Decorative Arts.
I was a total sucker and ordered the Brocade Home catalog that I mentioned in an earlier post . It came in the mail a couple of days ago. What can I say, curiosity got the better of me and now even though I’m on another corporate mailing list, at least I had something better in my mailbox than the weekly Comcast junk mail that I normally receive…
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Poststalgia for the Future
Posted in Discourse on Sun Sep 10, 06 by Kyle under Midcentury Modern and Industrious Production.
I came across a great new word recently, postalgia. A mashup of the verbal kind crossing nostalgia and the “post” prefix, as in postwar or post-Impressionism. (Notice how I so kindly declined to offer as an example the most abused “post”-ism buzzword of the late 20th century.) Fortunately, unlike some other unmentioned post-words you needn’t a postdoctoral degree to appreciate postalgia. According to the definition submitted to Merriam-Webster’s Open Dictionary by the neologism’s sci-fi writing creator Mark Shainblum postalgia is:
1. a wistful or excessively sentimental yearning for a projected future that never was; i.e. as promised by Disneyland and science fiction of the 1950’s.
2. a wistful or excessively sentimental yearning for a future era by a time-traveller in the past.
I couldn’t have defined it better myself. I encountered this new word while listening to a podcast of A Way with Words from KPBS on my ever-so-forward-yearning iPod and couldn’t help but think how appropriate the term is considering the Mid-Century Modern revival that is now sweeping the nation. The glowing idealism and faith in material and scientific progress of that era certainly seems appealing now in a time when things seem so much more complicated, unstable, and tumultuous. Considering it was a decade when there were only five megabyte hard-drives, idyllic four-person families, three major television networks, two genders, and one distant looming enemy threatening the US with nuclear annihilation, the 1950s seems downright stress-free and unambiguous compared with the poly-obbsessed, post-everything present.
So with mawkish utopian enthusiasm, let’s take a look back at some treasured postalgic treats from the 1950s that I’ve dug up for your scopic pleasure…
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Where is your flying car?
1890 Chronicle Building unmasked in restoration/condo conversion
Posted in Discourse on Wed Sep 6, 06 by Kyle under 19th Century and Architecture.
If you have been to downtown San Francisco lately you might have noticed the renovation and construction going on at the building on the corner of Market and Kearny Streets. That building, 690 Market Street, is the old headquarters of the San Francisco Chronicle. The cladding that has been hiding the original Romanesque Revival tower for the past 45 or so years is coming off and the Ritz-Carlton Hotel group has plans to restore and add additional stories to the building and put it to use as a luxury condo and time-share development.
This building was one of San Francisco’s first skyscraper buildings and was designed by the Chicago architects Daniel H. Burnham and John Wellborn Root. I was pretty stoked when I had heard about the restoration, as the the building is one of the few downtown buildings from the 1800s that (kind of) survived the 1906 earthquake. It was rebuilt by Willis Polk after the 1906 earthquake. It is always a great thing to see an old building come back to life again. Recently I ran across this old color lithograph from 1889 that shows the building in its original condition and some photos before and after the earthquake. The lithograph’s caption reads “The San Francisco Chronicle’s New Building: Throughly Fire Proof, Largest Clock in the World, Entirely Lighted by Electricity.” Truly top of the line for its time.
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Timeless sentiments
Posted in Discourse on Thu Aug 31, 06 by Kyle under 19th Century.
In a letter to Jean-Baptiste Leroy on November 13, 1789 Benjamin Franklin wrote that:
Our new Constitution is now established, and has an appearance that promises permanency; but in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.
With certainty I can can say that he was right. Despite the ever-changing nature of how the world looks and sounds, some things never manage to change. In that vein I offer for your consideration a glimpse at this turn of the century cartoon from The Wasp, a satirical (and quite often blatantly racist) magazine published in San Francisco through the last half of the 19th century.
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Rococo Revival 2006 Style
Posted in Discourse on Tue Aug 29, 06 by Kyle under Decorative Arts.
I am starting to see the stirrings of a Neo-Rococo Revival within the past year or so. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t see the Mid-century Modern or the Industrial-Loftcondo-DWR- Minimalism craze abating any time soon but I have the feeling that the zeitgeist is broadening some to let in a little more ornament and sophisticated whimsy.
The Urban Outfitters and Anthropologie twins have been coming out with various products in this vein for a couple of years now. Anthropologie has reproduction chairs and sofas in a simplified Louis VX style. Urban Outfitters’s Baroque and Rococo inspired offerings utilize either a stark black and white Gothic edge or a more contemporary bright and saturated pallet. I personally find the Anthropology furniture and accessories to be a bit too tepid and saccharine sweet for my taste. While the Urban Outfitters style is more fun and eye popping, they don’t offer enough to make any kind of integrated decor. They work better as fun accent pieces against a more neutral and modern background.
Now according to Apartment Therapy Restoration Hardware has entered the fray with its new Brocade Home collection…
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