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Wednesday Woman: Lucie Rie
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“If one ...

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Mar 5

Wednesday Woman: Lucie Rie
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“If one should ask me whether I believe myself to be a modern potter or a potter of tradition I would answer: I don’t know and I don’t care. Art alive is always modern, no matter how old or young. Art-theories have no meaning to me, beauty has.”
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Lucie Rie was an Austrian-born British studio potter known for her refined modernist ceramics. Born in Vienna in 1902, she originally wanted to be a sculptor, but once she was introduced to the potter’s wheel at the Vienna Kunstgewerbeschule, clay became the center of her life.
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In 1938, Rie fled Nazi-occupied Austria and settled in London, where her modernist ceramic style contrasted with the dominant rustic, oriental-inspired tradition led by figures like Bernard Leach. Throughout World War II, Rie kept a small studio and continued to produce pottery and small clay objects, including ceramic buttons and jewelry for the fashion industry. After the war, she turned to making tableware and one-of-a-kind vessels that combined functional simplicity with an expressive approach to form and texture.
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Rie’s work is distinguished by thin-walled porcelain, vibrant yet sophisticated glazes, and innovative surface treatments, such as sgraffito and manganese speckling. Unlike many British potters of her time, she rejected the heavy, utilitarian style in favor of a more refined aesthetic. Rie was honoured with the title of Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) in 1991.

Featuring a tailored, black terra-cotta and glass ...

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Mar 4

Featuring a tailored, black terra-cotta and glass grid facade, 28&7, developer @gdsny's new Manhattan office tower designed by @skidmoreowingsmerrill, feels less like an office building and more like a private club.
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“Our initial brief to SOM on this was to create an understated, beautifully crafted building that is almost like the classic black cocktail dress or classic tuxedo,” says Michael Kirchmann, GDSNY’s co-founder and CEO. “That whole ethos has gone to the interior as well and to the servicing and hospitality component of the building.”
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Providing a high-quality, well-serviced space for people to work in helps attract and retain prospective talent. Kirchmann noticed that, during COVID, many employees of small companies were meeting at the apartments and townhouses of their CEOs. GDNSY has ingrained this feeling of residential condos or hospitality spaces into the essence of its offices.
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Thanks to Julian Nazar for this story in @newyorkbizjournal. Link in bio to read the full article 🔗
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📸 @daveburk @conniezhounyc

Wednesday Woman: Elaine Lustig Cohen
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...

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Feb 27

Wednesday Woman: Elaine Lustig Cohen
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Elaine Lustig Cohen was an American graphic designer, artist, and rare book dealer. Born in New Jersey in 1926, Cohen was initially trained as a fine artist. She found her way to graphic design through her collaboration with her first husband, Alvin Lustig, a celebrated modernist designer. After his death, she established her own design practice and carried on work with many of the same clients. Her work stood out for its geometric abstraction, expressive typography, conceptual photography, and experimental use of negative space.
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Cohen produced book covers, museum catalogs, and signage for corporate and institutional clients including General Motors and the Jewish Museum throughout the 1960s. She pioneered the practice of architectural signage and collaborated with leading architects to design signs for the Seagram Building, the Kline Geology Laboratory, and other projects.
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By 1969, she focused her attention on making hard-edged, abstract paintings that drew from the same visual language as her graphic work. Later, she and her second husband, Arthur Cohen, publisher of Meridian Books, opened Ex Libris, a rare book store specializing in avant-garde 20th-century art and architecture.
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Cohen saw art and design as separate but equal practices, which she developed in tandem. “What is great about being an artist – painter, designer, sculptor, photographer or in other visual media – is that throughout your life you can keep opening doors that you never knew existed.”

"To plan a new future for the Waldorf ...

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Feb 26

"To plan a new future for the Waldorf Astoria, we began with deep research into its history. We scrutinized the original architects’ design intent, the building’s existing construction conditions and the Waldorf’s rich cultural history. Only by understanding its history, the changes made over time and contemporary requirements can we chart a new future for a building as significant as this." - Frank Mahan (@mahan.frank), principal and adaptive reuse practice leader at @skidmoreowingsmerrill (SOM).
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Over the past decade, SOM has undertaken a comprehensive restoration, preservation and adaptive reuse of the legendary Waldorf Astoria New York. The firm has transformed @waldorfnyc from a 1,400-key hotel to a 375-key hotel and a residential building with 375 apartments. There is no square inch in this 1.6-million-square-foot building that hasn't been touched and the work has been steeped in deep archival research.
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Thank you Jane Levere and William Goss for this wonderful @nytimes story that begins to explain the scope of the work that SOM has done on this building, which looms so large in the imaginations of New Yorkers.
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📸 @kmarksphoto

"If people have a mental image of ...

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Feb 23

"If people have a mental image of 'Disney architecture,' it’s likely to be themed: the faux-nostalgia of Disneyland’s Main Street, USA, the faux-futurism of Epcot’s globe, or the corporate-plus-characters period when Disney asked Michael Graves to design a hotel with a giant swan on top and Robert A.M. Stern a studio with Mickey’s pointy hat. In New York, the Disney-of-it-all asserts itself in the most academic of ways: This office is also a theme building, but the theme is post-industrial Manhattan. The design by SOM conveys all-grown-up seriousness in an urban landscape dotted with other media companies’ towers."
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Spanning a full city block near the Holland Tunnel, the new Manhattan headquarters for @disney by @skidmoreowingsmerrill embraces its historic urban setting with an exterior palette of rich green terra cotta, while bringing news, editorial, live productions, streaming, advertising, and numerous business units together under one roof for the first time.
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Thank you @langealexandra for this story in @citylab. Read more via the link in bio 🔗
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📸 @daveburk

New York City's first Passive House-certified...

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Feb 12

New York City's first Passive House-certified schools opened this year: the Elizabeth Jennings School for Bold Explorers (aka PS456), a progressive primary school, and Khalil Gibran International Academy (KGIA), an English-Arabic high school.
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Designed by @architecture.research.office in collaboration with @alloy.bk, this 146,000-square-foot building houses two public schools. The building's energy-efficient design consumes up to 75% less energy than standard NYC public schools. Incorporating continuous insulation and triple-glazed windows that block out noise from the street, the building exemplifies the principles of Passive House design. The grey iron spot brick exterior is intended to complement the neighborhood's historic character, as well as an adjacent high rise. “The design is really trying to make something that makes sense for brownstone Brooklyn, with the size, the scale of the windows, the materiality,” says ARO Principal Stephen Cassell.
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Thank you to @langealexandra covering this story in @citylab. Link in bio to read more!
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📸 @jamesewingphoto @imxplorer

Sharing images of @post_company’s gorgeous new ...

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Feb 12

Sharing images of @post_company’s gorgeous new office.
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After four years in Gowanus, Post Company has returned to its roots in Dumbo, the neighborhood where it was first established 13 years ago.
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Post Company approaches design by shaping spaces in response to their conceptual and contextual foundations. The new studio embodies this philosophy by offering a series of environments that reflect the firm’s diverse work across hospitality, residential projects, and beyond.
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Thanks to Alia Akkam for the feature in @archdigestpro. Link in bio to read more🔗
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📸 @chrismottalini

Wednesday Woman: Agnes Martin
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“My ...

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Feb 5

Wednesday Woman: Agnes Martin
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“My paintings are not about what is seen. They are about what is known forever in the mind.”
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Agnes Martin was a Canadian-American abstract painter known for her meditative, grid-based compositions. Born on a farm in rural Canada in 1912, Martin emigrated to the United States in the 1930s and studied at Teachers College, Columbia University in New York. She then moved to the desert plains of Taos, New Mexico, where she devoted herself to painting and developed an abstract style that caught the attention of New York gallerist Betty Parsons.
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On the advice of Parsons, Martin moved to New York in 1957 and established a studio on the Coenties Slip alongside a community of artists including Ellsworth Kelly and Robert Indiana. Here she developed her signature style: delicate pencil-drawn grids and bands of subtle, muted color applied with thin washes of paint. These paintings, which she described as expressions of beauty, innocence, and joy, rejected representation in favor of pure abstraction. Influenced by Zen Buddhist and American Transcendentalist ideas, Martin’s practice was tethered to spirituality and focused on cutting through materiality. “My paintings are about merging, about formlessness,” she said, “A world without objects, without interruption.”
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At the height of her success in 1967, Martin, facing the sudden death of her friend Ad Reinhardt and the growing strain of mental illness, abruptly left New York and returned to Taos. She abandoned painting for years, instead pursuing writing and meditation in isolation. When she returned to making art in 1974, her works retained the quiet discipline of her earlier grids but introduced bolder geometric schemes. Despite her reclusive lifestyle, her reputation as a desert mystic of minimalism grew and has inspired generations of artists.

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