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…
View More The Sense of BeautyCategory: 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!
Downeast Maine
I can’t believe summer almost flew by without a trip to the rocky coastline of Downeast Maine! I am missing the beautiful landscape I wasn’t…
View More Downeast MaineSummer Reading with Carmen Natschke
For those of you who think Carmen Natschke, of The Decorating Diva fame, is merely a glamorous gadabout holding court in the design stratosphere, there…
View More Summer Reading with Carmen NatschkeAllegorical Accents from Barry Dixon
Certain aspects of being southern seem to seep into the skin through osmosis. It’s as if the summer heat wriggles into our DNA, the perspiration…
View More Allegorical Accents from Barry DixonKips Bay Show House
“The house is one of the greatest powers of integration for the thoughts, memories and dreams of mankind,” wrote Gaston Bachelard in The Poetics of…
View More Kips Bay Show HouseCreation’s Patient Search
The title of this post references a book penned by the lauded Swiss architect Le Corbusier, first published in 1960. In all honesty, it’s more…
View More Creation’s Patient SearchTaking a Page (or Two) from Eudora Welty Books
Taking a Page (or Two) from Eudora Welty Books “Why don’t you design a chair, Saxon?” My normal response to the question, posed by the…
View More Taking a Page (or Two) from Eudora Welty Books