Those who drink champagne have varying ideas how bubbly it should be. This glass prompted me to think about how the shape of a glass affects the taste of champagne. Although we tend to associate saucer-style champagne glasses with elegant figures from the 1920s, this shape existed well before then. The Viennese firm J. & L. Lobmeyr has...
While researching one of our printer-dyer record books for the Cooper-Hewitt exhibition Multiple Choice: From Sample to Product, I discovered a curious fabric swatch on page 105. The fragment shows two incomplete figures in Japanese-style dress and includes the text “Dude Never Would Be Missed” and “Got Him On My List.” Both phrases are lyrics...
Scenic wallpapers were the epitome of block-printed wallpapers, requiring thousands of wood blocks to print a non-repeating scene that could wrap a room in a continuous landscape view. Scenic wallpapers were introduced around 1804 and remained popular as new scenes were added until the 1860s. Around the 1840s, a new style emerged that altered the scenic...
Earlier this year, I had the great pleasure of working as a Fellow in the Drawings and Prints Department at Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum. Over the course of several months, I cataloged nearly 1000 drawings of interiors and furniture by the legendary American modernist, Donald Deskey. Sorting through drawing after drawing, I became intimately familiar...
Collecting wallcoverings that are environmentally friendly is an area of great interest to me. Whether made from renewable resources or recycled materials, I appreciate when beautiful things can be made without adding undue stress on the environment. Made from 100% pre- and post-consumer recycled materials, the V2 wall tile by MIO, a company that creates sustainable...
In 1961, with the inauguration of its storewide import fairs, Bloomingdale’s commissioned its first series of designer bags to omit the store’s name. The department store became known for its “retail theater,” engaging leading artists, photographers, graphic designers, and fashion designers to create accompanying bags for special promotions. By the 1980s, Bloomingdale’s pioneered a more...
“All architects expect and hope that their work will act as a servant in some sense for humanity–to make a better world. This is a search we should always be undertaking.” —Samuel Mockbee Remember when cameras used film? In the early 1990s, on visits to my sister in Alabama, I would load my 35mm camera with...
In Niklaus Troxler’s abstraction, green and yellow bands pulsate on black. Rectangular slivers of shapes draw the viewer across and down. Diagonal paths form along the way. Reinforced by its title, Echoes of Techno, the image emits rhythm and sound, progressing over time. Troxler’s poster can be “read” on multiple levels, as is true of...
This beautiful cloth is a woman’s shoulder mantle, called a lliclla in the Quechua language of the Inca Empire, and was made during the colonial period of Peru. A perfect blend of the cross-cultural elements of the 16th– and 17th-century era of global trade, the Chinese silk and Spanish silver threads are woven with Inca techniques and...
