STYLETHREAD -- LET'S TALK SHOP!

sephorablue · Marc Jacobs

this is so sweet...

jacks435 · Kenneth Cole

Oh, that is really cute! How thoughtful of her. This probably isn't a popular opinion, but I love them together :)

kittenheels · Coach

Wow! What a nice thing to do. I don't particularly like her, but they seem very happy together and not weird like TomKat. I guess that's really all you can hope for from celebs - right?

wicked · Coach

Don't mean to hijack SB, but I live 15 min from the Gropius house. It is quite awesome!

This is my favorite, that's a piece of glass dividing the bedroom and the dressing room.

http://www.historicnewengland.org/visit/tour/house.asp?floor=0&floororder=1 for more pics

squishy · Coach

that's such a thoughtful gift. and i'm sure he's impossible to buy presents for, since he can afford to get anything he needs/wants.

sephorablue · Marc Jacobs

wicked wrote:

Don't mean to hijack SB, but I live 15 min from the Gropius house. It is quite awesome!

This is my favorite, that's a piece of glass dividing the bedroom and the dressing room.

http://www.historicnewengland.org/visit/tour/house.asp?floor=0&floororder=1 for more pics

that's so cool!

scarlett · Marc Jacobs

wow, that is such a thoughtful gift!

my uncle did some plumbing work at falling water -- i think it was one of the highlights of his career, to work on such a special place.

Hermes

jacks435 - I like them together too - I always thought Jen was an odd mate for him to chose.

I love Frank Lloyd Wright designs and love Fallingwater too! Could you imagine having been one of the Kaufmanns and having that as your summer cottage? I especially love the use of cantilevers in his designs - I even designed a cantilever table inspired by Wright that ended up being shown at NeoCon.

These Usonian houses are very near where I live:

Affleck House

Melvyn Maxwell Smith House

sephorablue · Marc Jacobs

D wrote:

jacks435 - I like them together too - I always thought Jen was an odd mate for him to chose.

Melvyn Maxwell Smith House

D--I like them together too (obviously.) He's not one of the actors I find particularly attractive, but he seems like a very interesting and intelligent person. And her I just love.

And that Usonian house is incredible. What's amusing to me, though, is that the man couldn't design furniture, or at least chairs at any rate, to save his life (unless you know of some things I haven't seen). The pieces are beautiful to look at, but they amuse me because they bear no relationship whatsoever to the human body. It's interesting to me that someone with such prodigious talent would be so fixated on his ideas of volume and form that he would fail to account for something as basic as function.

squishy · Coach

admittedly, i know nothing about architecture, but i was clicking through that usonian link. there's a hallway with a clearance space of four feet? wth? is there a particular reason for this?

Hermes

sephorablue - that's a really interesting observation. considering he designed so many homes to be an extension of the land, you would think his furniture would be an extension of the body, but there are absolutely no ergonomics. He was very full of himself and maybe it was another way to let his clients know who is boss? I mean, it was pretty much take it or leave it with his designs or a big fight would ensue. For example, the Penfield house (the one squishy is referring to in regard to hallway width); his response to 6'8" Penfield was that he would just design a machine to insert him into the house horizontally. Wright endeavored to create continuous lines like Rietveld, as well as a tension between shapes. Since he had to compromise his typical low lying horizontal designs (Wright was very short and designed for his body) he then extended the continuous line vertically vs. horizontally to accommodate his client. So there may have been some rare accommodation to the dwellers of the home, but it is obvious that didn't carry through in his furniture designs. Actually, his home designs were not very structurally sound, although he did make engineering advances in architecture through the risks he took.

-- Edited by D at 14:31, 2006-12-12

sephorablue · Marc Jacobs

D wrote:

Actually, his home designs were not very structurally sound, although he did make engineering advances in architecture through the risks he took.

-- Edited by D at 14:31, 2006-12-12

Interesting that you say that--when I went to Fallingwater a few years ago, they were just finishing up a major structural overhaul of the cantilevers because they were all sagging by a few inches. Apparently he hadn't calculated the load properly.

One of my dec arts prof's favorite stories was about Wright being such a megalomaniac that he actually designed some dresses for a client's wife to wear in the house.

halleybird · Hermes

My dad would die of happiness with a gift like that. How cool!