"Exposed a Deep Faultline Over How the History of the Community Should Be Understood"

"Much of the site remains–the visitors' center, architect's house and carriage house were not damaged. If the mansion cannot be rebuilt, Magliari anticipates a number of possibilities from a reconstruction to a Mechoopda cultural center or museum, or perhaps the return of the land to the tribe."

Dani Anguiano at The Guardian discusses the legacy of the founder of Chico, California, John Bidwell.

"This Is the Complex Legacy of Modernism"

"Of course, some might say that Mari had it all wrong and Kamprad had it right: that, practically speaking, designers have to dance to capitalism's tune, so they may as well learn to like it. There is certainly variation across the discipline. Graphic design in particular lends itself to gestures of protest, from punk album covers to handmade banners. But architecture and product design, where the big money is, have always been service businesses. And what they serve is profitability. Mari himself was sustained by commissions from Danese and other companies. He did try to infuse every one of his products with humanistic values and make them affordable. But he was still making commodities, and it pained him. In the above-quoted interview, he mused, 'My wife, who is an intelligent woman, totally despises all design. Even what I did.' But what other option did he have?"

Glenn Adamson in The Nation tells the story of "[t]he Communist Designer, the Fascist Furniture Dealer, and the Politics of Design."

"Jackson's Out, the Franklins Are In"

"In recent years, Joe Biden has also become vocal about racial issues, citing the horrors of the Charlottesville 'Unite the Right' rally in 2017 as his motivation for jumping into the 2020 presidential contest, and calling in his inaugural address for confronting the threat of 'white supremacy.' In response to the civil unrest last year prompted by police brutality against African Americans, Biden made a point of rejecting calls to defund the police but made promises to push for criminal justice reform. Both as a candidate and in his first days as president, Biden has challenged Americans to live up to their ideals, including the proposition that 'all men are created equal.' Ben Franklin's story, therefore, from slaveholder to staunch antislavery advocate, can help remind us of the power and importance of living up to the revolutionary promises of the founding."

Daniel N. Gullotta and Kelsa Pellettiere at The Bulwark discuss "[h]ow to understand President Joe Biden’s choice of Oval Office art."

"Accidental Architect"

"All of this work with the Disney people over the decades began because of that one young man and the love the Disney people had for me." 

Sam Weller at The Paris Review presents an old interview with Ray Bradbury about Bradbury's influence on architecture.

"Toppling Monuments Will Not Help Us Properly Understand Our Past or Resolve Our Present Troubles"

"Of course, we need critical and enquiring study of the British empire in our schools. But the aim should be to understand it–why it came into being, how it sustained itself for so long, and how it come to an end (and yes, what role slavery played, and why it was abolished)–not to praise empire on the one hand or damn it on the other."

Richard J. Evans at The New Statesmen discusses the "history wars."

Krakatoa, East of Java

"Craven Walker didn't envision the lamps as paragons of grooviness. 'They weren't marketed like that—they were almost staid,' Granger says. Indeed, an ad in a 1968 edition of the American Bar Association Journal touted the 'executive' model—mounted on a walnut base alongside a ballpoint pen.
"As light fixtures go, the lamps are peculiar in that they don't cast much light. They appeal to people at ease in darkness."

Abigail Tucker in a 2013 Smithsonian article explains the history of the lava lamp.

"It Has Touched Almost Every Aspect of Cultural and Commercial Production"

"The school's founding proclamation made no mention of industry or new technology. Instead, it called for 'a new guild of craftsmen, free of the divisive class pretensions that endeavoured to raise a prideful barrier between craftsmen and artists!' It aimed to break down barriers between art and different forms of craft. It dreamt of 'a new building of the future that will unite every discipline', which would 'rise to heaven from the hands of a million workers as a crystal symbol of a new faith'."

Rowan Moore at The Guardian marks the centennial of the Bauhaus.

As Little as Possible

"'Totally. That's why I do feel like it's a challenge to the design world to reassess what we're producing, why we're producing it, and how we could do it better. Do we really need all this stuff?' asks Hustwit, in a way he knows his question isn't even a question. 'San Francisco is the center of the design world, packed with all these people, and they're listening to this 86-year-old German guy in his backyard for an hour and a half, about like, how they're fucking up. And they're loving it, and they're laughing!'"

Mark Wilson at Fast Company writes about a new documentary about designer Dieter Rams.

And Harry McCracken offers an obit for designer Charles Harrison, who died in November.

"The Difference Between the Traditional Old City and the New Theme Park"

"Moore's seeming prescience about the conditions we now call 'neoliberal' (POPS are quintessential neoliberal spaces) accrued from his astute observation of California in postwar transition. You might say that Moore, and his essays, are historical vessels so vigorous that an era seems to pour through them. The new freeways that sped his statewide journeys, the massive water infrastructure that fed his beloved public fountains, the public university campuses that he admired (and where he worked)—in retrospect these were high points of a receding vision of hyper-modernization and civil engineering spurred, especially from the New Deal on, by federal, state, and municipal munificence. The impact of such public investment, to draw on a key word in Moore's essay, was 'equalitarian.' But when he praised the Disney maintenance crews for working better than corresponding public services (those 'handsomely costumed young people' who 'sweep away the gum wrappers almost before they fall to the spotless pavement'), and when, in a later essay on electronics, he would claim that 'our new places … are given form with electronic, not visual glue,' Moore was delicately gauging the more general societal turn, from the 1960s to the '80s and up to today, towards privatization and away from large-scale planning, top-down technocratic expertise, and public policy advocacy."

Simon Sadler at Places introduces Charles Moore's "You Have to Pay for the Public Life" from 1965.

"Melville's Bartleby in Unfertilized Yolk Form"

"Cute is more than just a look. It has the power to change us, be the salve to our greatest frustrations and fears, and perhaps show us something in ourselves that we didn't know we needed—especially if your true self is an egg with a butt and a distaste for life."

Alex Abad-Santos at Vox takes a look at the popularity of Japan's Gudetama.

"Superman to Smile, Mickey to Maus"

"Strung together, these pages are a megacomic of their own, documenting the evolution of an art form in constant flux."

New York presents "The 100 Pages That Shaped Comics."

"Displaying to the World the Depth of Your Grief in Tangible, Material Means"

"Which is to say that the question about madness that swirls around Sarah Winchester is always in part a question of changing tastes. The work of mourning is not a constant, but changes from generation to generation. Victorian ostentation gives way to embalming and a lifelike appearance for open caskets, to cremation and scattering of ashes, to green burials. Sarah Winchester, who in this film enters the twentieth century still clad in last century's widow's weeds, seems to ask that most pressing question: If this behavior wasn't mad 30 years ago and you've simply kept up at it, has it become mad now?"

Colin Dickey at the New Republic reviews the new movie Winchester.

"That Brings Us to the M Word"

"One Wednesday when I am out tallying all the construction sites for this story, I see Ray Chavez carrying his baby daughter on a walk around the neighborhood, enjoying yet another warm winter day in our beloved community by the sea. It occurs to me that his little girl will have to learn about the old Venice from her father's stories.
"He'll tell her about growing up here, how parents all let their kids roam the town with the only restriction that they be back in time for dinner. And he'll tell her how much her grandfather paid for the house she lives in, and she'll laugh at the impossibility of it."

Martin L. Jacobs in The Argonaut discusses the "mansionization" of East Venice. 

"Changed Not Just the Furniture Sector, but the Way People Decorated and Led Their Lives at Home"

"The initial success of Ikea's no-nonsense furniture was ascribed to the Swedes' obsession with functionalism. Lars Engman, Ikea's then design manager, said in 2003: 'Sweden created the Volvo, Italy the Ferrari.' The bright colours of the products were designed as an antidote to Sweden's long, dark winters."

Julia Kollewe and Richard Orange at The Guardian write an obit for Ikea founder Ingvar Kamprad.

"A Style Built on Exaggeration"

"Googie is undeniably the super-aesthetic of 1950s and '60s American retro-futurism—a time when America was flush with cash and ready to deliver the technological possibilities that had been promised during WWII. 'I really feel that Googie made the future accessible to everyone,' Hess says. As he explains it, Googie was an unpretentious aesthetic meant to appeal to the average, middle-class American: 'One of the key things about Googie architecture was that it wasn't custom houses for wealthy people—it was for coffee shops, gas stations, car washes, banks… the average buildings of everyday life that people of that period used and lived in. And it brought that spirit of the modern age to their daily lives.'"

In 2015 and 2011 Smithsonian articles, Matt Novak discusses vernacular mid-century modernism.

"Lego Renderings of Crematoria and Barracks"

"This week, the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, Poland, announced on its website that it has acquired Libera's concentration camp creations. The museum said it purchased the artwork on Dec. 30 from a Norwegian art collector for 55,000 euros, or approximately $71,800. The museum described the pieces as 'one of the most important works of contemporary Polish art.'"

A 2012 Los Angeles Times article by David Ng discusses the most controversial Lego set of all time.

"The Most Unusual Exhibition That We've Done Here at the Museum"

"Her interest was sparked by a family friend, Dr. George Burgess Magrath, one of the first medical examiners in the country, who believed many cases went unsolved because untrained investigators contaminated or misread crime scenes.
"Marks said, 'They would talk for hours and hours in the evenings about crimes and the state of crime detection. And she decided, "I can do something about that."'
"At age 65, Lee--then living in New Hampshire--began meticulously constructing the 3-D models, spending three to six months of each one."

Erin Moriarty on CBS's Sunday Morning views a Smithsonian exhibit called "Murder Is Her Hobby: Frances Glessner Lee and The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death," dioramas of unsolved crimes.

"The Last Survivor of a Story That Gripped Great Britain and the World More Than 50 Years Ago"

"Platt said his mother was from a generation where there was 'great shame' and she had felt it when she recalled her past. 'But she shouldn't have because, looking back, there was real good that came out of what happened. It did pull the curtain back, and there were changes in society that were needed.'
"He said she was a devoted, loving mother.
"'She was a good, decent person, and she got a very unfair label that was hard for her to live with.'
"The press vilified her, he said."

Caroline Davies at The Guardian writes an obit for Christine Keeler.

Tamsin Blanchard at The Guardian in 2002 talks with Lewis Morley, who took the most famous photograph of Keeler.

"Design That Does Not Get Obsolete"

"On the CBS show "Person to Person" in 1956, Loewy explained his design philosophy: 'I felt it was my duty to try to do whatever I could to introduce a little beauty among the things and the surroundings we live with.'"

Jane Pauley on CBS Sunday Morning recalls designer Raymond Loewy.

From Kunsthaus to Your House

"In fact, everyday good architecture should not even be about the building, it should be about the people. If the building isn't intended as some kind of public monument or centerpiece, it shouldn't draw much attention to itself. Frank Gehry is a wanton violator of this rule: when he decided to design homes for the Lower Ninth Ward in post-Katrina New Orleans, he created a discordant batch of hyper-contemporary houses that 'riffed' on the region’s traditional vernacular architecture. Rather than being concerned to give people comfortable houses that fit in with their surroundings and suited the preferences of the residents, Gehry designed houses that screamed for attention and were fundamentally about themselves rather than about the people of the city he ostensibly cared about. Good buildings recede seamlessly into their surroundings; Gehrys blare like an industrial klaxon."

Brianna Rennix and Nathan J. Robinson at Current Affairs criticize contemporary architecture.