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From Dezeen…

Carrara-marble blocks

Alpha Beta Gamma is a set of 3 blocks; simply cut, substantial in mass and satisfying to touch. These polished marble blocks by Milanese designer Emanuele Pizzolorusso can be arranged on your desk to make miniature monuments. Some blocks have grooves or holes punched into them like doors or windows and others have an edge that is completely rounded. Arrange them in infinite ways to create forms that are at once unique and universal. Your own sanctuary may be built from these harmonious blocks, designed to give rise to the largest possible number of combinations. More…

From Dezeen…

In 2008, Studio Dumbar started the development of the Korean national road signage system in co-operation with the Hong-Ik university. The previous road signage system had many disadvantages which led to confusion at best, and accidents at its worst. ??Challenges were the lack of logic in the system, regulatory problems, overcrowding, the fixed size of the panels and a disproportion in letter size, letter space and leading. With signs in both Korean and roman script, and in some areas even Chinese, it is no wonder the old signs were over crowded. The phonetically spelled, romanized translations of Korean words are often very long, making it a challenge to fit all the letters on one row. To add to the confusion, third parties were also placing signs with advertising around the traffic signs, making the roads even harder to navigate. More…

From Martin FIller at The New York Review of Books…

I first met the designer Ray Kaiser Eames in 1977, when she showed me, my wife, and our son around the renowned Pacific Palisades house she and Charles Eames built between 1947 and 1949 from off-the-shelf industrial components. As she moved slowly through the high-ceilinged living room of the light-flooded, modular-paneled structure at the edge of an arcadian meadow overlooking the ocean, she reacted to the myriad possessions that crowded every horizontal surface as if she had never seen them before. “Oh my God, look at this!” she cawed like an excited mynah bird as she grabbed some pretty trifle, peered at it intently, and extolled its ravishing beauty.

One could not help but love her unbridled enthusiasm, but also quickly understood how trying she might be to live with. As fellow workaholics, the Eameses were providentially matched as the most gifted furniture designers of the twentieth century. Yet their less-than-idyllic private history—they were married in 1941 and remained together, not without difficulty, until the end of his life—also suggests that there was a high price to pay for their countless sacrifices on the altar of creativity. That is the main impression one gathers from Eames: The Architect and the Painter, an engrossing but ultimately unsettling new documentary by Jason Cohn and Bill Jersey. More…

From Charles Jencks at Blueprint Magazine…

Strange as it may sound, post-modern architecture flourished after it was declared dead in the Nineties. Perhaps all it needed was a name change, the disappearance of a moniker that had tantalised people for 20 years. Whatever the case, ‘post-modernism blossomed after the millennium in all but name, especially in architecture. With the return of ornament and pattern-making, the explosive growth in iconic buildings and landmark sculptures – works that are symbolic and highly communicative – many of the PM concerns of the Eighties and Nineties have become central to society.

This cryptic rebirth raises the question of how we categorise a period, especially the modern one. Most historians date the modern age to the Renaissance for two essential reasons: the birth of the global economy and the nation state. Beyond such determinants there are the words of the participants themselves, the repetitive use of that big brand ‘moderna’, and its cognate terms of praise. Architects and historians, such as Filarete and Vasari, used that term positively on countless occasions. If one accepts that both popular and professional usage defines labels, then one might call the period 1970-1990 a post-modern era; but I think that would be a kind of modern mistake. It would be reductive, oversimplifying many different voices, and would erase the important continuities as well as a greater global truth. Much of the world is still embedded in traditional culture. Rather, it makes sense to conceive of history as interacting multiple waves, or parallel bands or rivers that compete and go underground or perhaps re-emerge for short periods. More…

From Martin Filler at The New York Review of Books…

I wept, but about what precisely I cannot say. Much to my amazement, after having done everything possible to shut out the ubiquitous maudlin press coverage that engulfed the tenth anniversary of the 2001 terrorist attacks, I visited Michael Arad’s National September 11 Memorial in New York City—which was dedicated exactly a decade after the disaster—to find that it impressed me at once as a sobering, disturbing, heartbreaking, and overwhelming masterpiece.

Arad’s inexorably powerful, enigmatically abstract pair of abyss-like pools, which demarcate the foundations of the lost Twin Towers, comes as a surprise to those of us who doubted that the chaotic and desultory reconstruction of Ground Zero could yield anything of lasting value. It is generally held that great architecture requires the participation of a great client, but just how this stunning result emerged from such a fraught and contentious process will take some time for critics and historians to sort out. More…