Bubblegum Pink, Bubblegum Popped
Amanda Vallance meets the gal pal of Barbie and Paris Hilton.
Research
Edith Wharton’s Houses
Architecture critic Alexandra Lange extolls on Edith Wharton’s fluency as a decorator and architect of the domestic milieu
A Life in Lacquer
Katya Mezhibovskaya on the color that puts the world at our fingertips.
Interior Lives: Inside the Homes of New Yorkers
Katya Mezhibovskaya visits the apartments of young New Yorkers to find cultural meaning in their possessions and domestic arrangements.
Patterns of Ornament: Technology and Theory in Contemporary Architectural Decoration
Julia van den Hout explores examples of contemporary experimentation with material and structure, and the creation of elaborate forms that are ornate, yet retain their essential function.
Designing for Repair: Things Can Be Fixed
Derrick Mead analyzes themes in critical design such as designing for repair, designing for failure, and designing for “cradle-to-cradle” type life cycles.
Missing the Modern Gun: Object Ethics in Collections of Design
Barbara Eldredge questions why guns are missing from museum design collections.
Main Street, USA and the Power of Myth
Ann Weiser explores the disconnect between the reality and idealized fantasy of Main Street, from the financially privileged communities of old New England towns and New Urbanist Greenfield developments, to the crumbling sidewalks of Main Streets ravaged by the methamphetamine epidemic.
Unpacking the Pastoral Food Package: Myth-Making in Graphic Design
Anna Kealey dissects the visual and verbal cues on food packaging–from the seemingly obvious to the far more abstract–and illustrates how they are used to create myths about food.
Public Housing Playlist
After researching the roles of policy and design in the failures of public housing, Erin Routson compiled a hip-hop playlist/audio tour guide which reframes New York’s most notorious housing projects as sites of creative production.
Untangling the Naps: The Afro Talks Back
Michele Washington illustrates the ways in which the Afro has been used as a significant graphic element in the black vernacular narrative.
If These Walls Could Talk: the Fraught Interiors of The Hours
Katya Mezhibovskaya considers the 2002 Stephen Daldry film, The Hours, as a study of interiors and interiorities.
Rockwood Revisited
Zachary Sachs conjures a (fateful) day in the life of his childhood home on Rockwood Street, Dallas.
Blue Walls
Metropolis magazine associate editor Avinash Rajagopal on the most comforting shade of pastel blue known to mankind.
Alvorada: How Social Change is Shaping Brazilian Design and Creating Brazil’s Own Design Model
On a research trip to Brazil, Frederico Duarte discovers that Marcel Rosenblum, with his massively popular “Lar Doce Lar” (Home Sweet Home) TV show, a local “Extreme Makeover” in which he and host Luciano Huck go around the country redecorating—and often rebuilding—poor families’ homes, exerts a more real and powerful influence on Brazilian culture than such celebrated design exports as the Campana brothers.
Tabula Rubra: Critical Reflections on the Design of Mars
Crew journalist Mike Neal arrives at his home for the next two weeks—the Mars Desert Research Station Habitat in the Utah desert—and confronts the architecture of desolation he finds there.
Introduction, Tiny Houses
The smallest living space featured in the book Tiny Houses by Mimi Zeiger
Tinkers
Hallucinating, in death throes from cancer and kidney failure, an old man sees the walls around him begin to collapse, as he returns in his mind to his impoverished childhood in the backwoods of Maine.
An Uphill Struggle
R/GA Executive Creative Director David Womack weighs up survival versus comfort as he assembles a home-away-from-home in his backpack.
A Trip Across America and Back in Pursuit of a Place to Call Home
Urban design critic Karrie Jacobs sacrifices her New York home to launch a magazine in San Francisco that was all about other people’s homes, gets homesick, has an epiphany during a Spider-Man movie, and finally comes home.