To design is much more than simply to assemble, to order, or even to edit: it is to add value and meaning, to illuminate, to simplify, to clarify, to modify, to dignify, to dramatize, to persuade, and perhaps even to amuse. To design is to transform prose into poetry. —Paul Rand I’m absolutely giddy to share […]
Category: Books
I simply cannot imagine my life without books! The fact I was accused of always having “my nose in a book” as a child was a sign of things to come for sure.
The claim is still true and I am thrilled I’ve created a platform for myself that allows me to use books as windows into time and on the world. I never know when a title is going to jump out at me, and it’s not simply literary titles. I get just as excited over big, beautiful design books that capture my aesthetic imagination, as the ones that did in my diary entry Narratives that Illuminate Design.
It was the fact that Antony Clayton did such a bang-up job of presenting the gestalt of fin-de-siècle London in his book Decadent London that inspired me to build a post around it. I’ve long held a fascination for Aubrey Beardsley, whose comment to Ezra Pound, Beauty is Difficult, sent me on an aesthetical whirlwind of a study at New York University when I was attending graduate school there.
Design writer Carmen Natschke inspired a great post in which I presented her summer reading list. It’s one for the ages, especially given she keeps herself on a stringent learning curve that has her reading constantly. I read a great deal and there is no way I can keep up! In my diary entry The Difficult of Writing Well, I share a bit of dissing that went on between Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein that gave me jaw-dropping pause. I knew the two could get sideways but the snark I discovered while going through Edmund Wilson’s papers at Beinecke made me laugh aloud!
Snow White Meets Settenani
“Oh, mirror, mirror on the wall, am I most beautiful of all?” Snow White’s mother, the envious Queen, would ask her looking glass each evening, soothed by the oracle’s assurances until the night it copped to the fact there was no way she could outshine her daughter’s loveliness. Into the woods went pretty Snow White, […]
Michele De Lucchi: A Conversation of Soul
The Greek philosopher Plato likened thought to “a conversation of the soul with itself—a philosophical communication.” It isn’t unusual for me to attend thought-provoking events but the Salone del Mobile press conference on January 15th brought me a deeper experience than I would have expected thanks to the presentation Milanese architect Michele De Lucchi gave regarding […]
Harlow at Bergdorfs!
I stood for a while admiring the chandelier in the window at Bergdorf Goodman. There was something about its icy lozenges of light telescoping out from a brass center spindle like planets around an axis that caught and held my eye even before I learned it was called the Harlow. Bergdorfs Welcomes Harlow The tony window-dressing […]
The Age of Genius
“Ordinary facts are arranged within time, strung along its length as on a thread,” writes Bruno Schulz in his short story The Age of Genius. “There they have their antecedents and their consequences, which crowd tightly together and press hard one upon the other without any pause. This has its importance for any narrative, of […]
Dream of Venice
When JoAnn Locktov asked me to contribute a poem to the book she was planning to publish in collaboration with photographer Charles Christopher, I didn’t hesitate. When she gave me access to the photography so I could choose an image to use as my inspiration for the piece, which would be paired with the photo […]
Ally Coulter and the Opulent Salon
Ally Coulter’s grand salon on the first floor of the Holiday House NYC took my breath away the minute I entered the room. It was as if I’d stepped into a Romanesque nod to modernism that intermingles a smooth mix of time-honored and modern elements—Otto Naumann art and Newel antiques hold court alongside Fendi Casa furniture […]
Rooms of Their Own
A private place in which to write… As someone whose life is spent working with words for at least a part of every day, I find myself obsessively scouring the biographies I read for mentions of the rooms in which lauded writers made their magic. Descriptions of them exist more often than visuals do so I […]
Harmony and Proportion
Love of beauty is taste…the creation of beauty is art. -Emerson I’ve been a fan of Alexandra Stoddard since I came across the designer’s book Living a Beautiful Life in the mid-1980s. She has since become a prolific author with an insightful list of releases but Living a Beautiful Life remains the book I return to […]
The Sense of Beauty
I am guessing this will not come as much of a surprise to anyone but me. As I was digitizing the majority of my design and architecture clips—all 400 of them—during the past few days it occurred to me that my twenty-year career as a journalist and author has been focused around the subject of […]