We have to admit we’ve got a soft-spot for Tyler Brûlé’s exquisite advertorial-cum-lifestyle rag, Monocle—a publication so baldly materialistic that it attains a kind of cracked spirituality, endlessly tongue-kissing global capitalism with equal parts Deleuzian mania and Clive Owen cool. So when we heard that the magazine was opening a store, its second (after a branch in London), in Los Angeles’ Brentwood County Mart, we were jazzed! And then it opened, on Monday, and we live in New York and were consequently unable to be there. We got some of the skinny, however, from the LA Times:

Monocle the store covers just 115 square feet. The interior’s modular Vitsoe shelves are meant to echo the magazine’s modular black-and-white design, while the merchandise—designer collaborations from around the world—communicates the magazine’s international editorial mission.

That’s great! Better still is Tyler’s theory of the Future of Print: luxury, luxury, luxury. “Print should fight back by adding richness,” sez he, and the new shop is obvs. part of that process of brand enrichment. But inquiring minds want to know: Who was actually responsible for designing the store?

It would be a pity if Brûlé chose to do the store designs in-house, simply conforming to the present look of the magazine. If print publications are going to have to go into retail, it stands to reason that the retail spaces they create will have to be flexible enough to change with the times in tandem with the evolving aesthetic of the publications to which they’re attached. Cross-promotional opportunities! Intermittent designer showcases! If not in LA, Tyler, why not try it out in New York? Pleeeease?

Monocle Shop Opens in Brentwood [LA Times]

As part of the Wipe Away The Tears Program(TM), we encourage you to check out tonight’s Architectural League multi-colon-ed event, Globalization: Perspectives, Time Place and Practice: SOM.

Nicholas Adams, author of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill: SOM since 1936, will spotlight projects from over seven decades of the firm’s international work, beginning with some of the little-known World War II and post -War projects. Adams will then moderate a discussion with past SOM chairman John Winkler and current partner Mustafa K. Abadan examining the changing relationship between practice abroad and practice at home.

Rare chance to hear the inside scoop on SOM, a firm that actually takes a pretty serious approach to getting the inside scoop on itself (viz: SOM Journal).

Tonight, 7pm, the Urban Center (457 Madison Avenue)

As the news that we’re departing begins to sink in, beloveds, rest assured that we will leave you fully stocked with things to do to take your collective minds off of our singular loss. Next Thursday, April 16th, join Michael Bierut of Design Observer and Pentagram, Cheryl Dorsey of Echoing Green, Jeffrey Kalmikov and Jake Nickell of Threadless, and host Josh Rubin of Coolhunting, as they talk in a series of Coolhunting/Behance-organized lectures, and focus “less on inspiration, and more on how idea generation and organization come together to make ideas happen.”

How many unwritten novels, unrealized campaigns, and brilliant ideas have never seen the light of day?

Between us, we’ve got two, seventeen, and one hundred and thirty-six.

The 99% Conference [99%]

Billie Tsien of Tod Williams Billie Tsien is giving the 2009 Eleanore Pettersen Lecture tonight at Cooper Union. The talk is called Women’s Work Is Never Done, and we encourage attendance. Tsien is one of the most thoughtful, charismatic, and just plain good architects working today, and the chance to hear her on her own—nothing against Edifave husband/partner Tod Williams, of course—should be taken.

6:30, The Great Hall of the Cooper Union, 7 East 7th Street.

Image Lara Kappler.

The American Institute of Architects is one of the greatest architecturally-focused organizations there is, and we’re thrilled to be able to support them in their latest venture. Tonight, they welcome Joel Sanders, architect and landscape architect, as he gives a talk, 6pm tonight at the Center for Architecture, entitled “Interface: Overlapping Interior and Exterior, a lecture by Joel Sanders.” According to the informative link, Sanders will “explore how sustainable principles can be used to generate an integrated landscape/architecture vocabulary that links interior and exterior, natural and synthetic.”

Sounds really interesting! The play between inside and outside and public and private is something that has in no way been discussed enough, particularly critically and engagingly, and it’s wonderful that Sanders is taking on this little-examined topic. It is also particularly relevant in light of recent moves in the sustainable world, a universe that is equally entrancing. We look forward to hearing what Sanders has to say, and to engaging with him in a critical discourse on landscape/architecture. It would be amazing if he could generate an integrated vocabulary. That’s exactly the kind of semantically full language we need more of.

2009 Oberfield Memorial Lecture [AIANY]

There’s nothing like the sweet sight of post-critical dialectic to get us all riled up on a Wednesday. From 5-10pm today, LA time, eight practitioners and writers are giving back-to-back talks at the rooftop of the Standard. Yesterday saw Edible Estater Fritz Haeg, mysterious Dellis Cayer Joseph Grima, BLDGBLGer and Postopolis co-host (along with Plataforma Arquitectura/ArchDaily, City of Sound, Subtopia, we make money not art, and mudd up!) Geoff Manaugh, and baller Jeffrey Inaba. Today, get ready for Mary-Ann Ray, David Gissen, Ken Ehrlich, and others. Tomorrow, stay tuned for non-loony (sorry, Orhan, that was then, before we’d found our way) Archinect editor Orhan Ayyüce, and Mike the Poet. As Manaugh describes it:

We’re bringing art, architecture, music, film, design, planning, politics, sci-fi, special effects, geology, history, lost rivers, futurism, and archaeology to Los Angeles, that city of tar pits and movie stars, of beaches, landslides, and mountain lion attacks, of universities and parking lots, of real estate speculation and individualized automotive fractality, city of black magic, mass murder, and abandoned swimming pools, military simulation labs, Die Hard and plate tectonics. City of the Center for Land Use Interpretation, of ecologies, gravel pits, and infrastructure.

Sounds a little all-over-the-place to us. What does geology have to do with design? Why are they talking about mountain lions? Where’s the architecture?

Today’s prime directive: Tear yourselves away from the park, the neighborhood, the outdoor patio just in time to make it to see Dan Wood and Amale Andraos, partners in work and life and excellence who together the Rotterdam clutches of our old friend Rem to found WorkAC, talk about their firm’s Shovel Ready pizzazz tonight at Parsons. Reception and lecture tonight at 6, 25 East 13th St, 2nd floor. It might not be a Pecha Kucha but if their previous work like Villa Pup and a crazy awesome green Vegas proposal they did for Ian Schrager, or Dan’s tendency to put on a skirt is anything to go by, it should be great. Not to mention their involvement in Ordos 100 (the greatest architectural mystery known to 2009?) and plans to take over the world. Get away from the flowers and towards the farms.

From the Independent:

More than 40 years after Joern [sic] Utzon was forced off the site of the Sydney Opera House, the building’s visionary designer was finally honoured by Australia today at a memorial service held inside the masterpiece that he never saw completed…

The service was attended by Mr Utzon’s children, Jan and Lin, and featured performances by the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, Opera Australia and the Australian Ballet, underlining the architect’s contribution to the country’s arts.

The Oscar-winning actress Cate Blanchett read from Shakespeare’s Cymbeline, while Neil Finn, from the band Crowded House, performed the group’s hit “Don’t Dream It’s Over”.

About time. The event comes amidst news that a hoped-for upgrade of the building is doomed due to the Australian Prime Minister’s reluctance to help foot the bill. Some tribute.

Honoured at Last: Man behind Sydney Opera House [Independent]
PM Turns Back on Opera House Plans [Australian]

Image courtesy Swindle

In a bit of an example of a monolithic institution attempting to achieve cultural traction by trying to get into the world of young-and-hip designers and just veering a bit to the “ka-what??” direction, the folks over at the madly well-designed (thank you, Brad Cloepfil!) Museum of Arts and Design are hosting up-and-coming young hotshot Karim Rashid (ahem, Dror? no Harry and Claudia? no Designglut?) as he discusses, probably, Karim Rashid. As they remind us, “Karim has infused consumer culture with his signature Sensual Minimalism.” As we’d like to remind you, Rashid was superhot about five-to-six years ago. Now, MAD. We know you’re that combination of venerable institution and foot-finding mission. But if the buzz around the Salone talk that slipped the Rashid radiator show in between the chairs and the economic climate was anything to go by, he just doesn’t do it for us. Rashid’s a great standby, and introduced a necessary visual culture to New York, don’t get us wrong. But with all these other product designers launching oil barrel necklaces and movable islands, it’s hard to see why the museum picked him to curate Totally Rad. Honestly? Seems totally mad.

Image courtesy Markley Boyer/Wildlife Conservation Society

Next slide. Come on. I’m running behind. This is the whale. We wanted to make it more interactive. I did the blog for myself. We can stop hunger. Twitter your symptoms. What the f*ck is this?

The biggest excitement from last night’s Pecha Kucha remains a toss-up between Emeco’s revelation of their latest Frank Gehry design—a $250,000 chaise lounge that even Mr. G himself can only awkwardly sidle into and that looks about as comfortable as a sharp stick in the feelings (at Milan soon!)—and Jonathan Harris’ photodocumentation of a whale hunt. Overlap with those what you will, as it is not ours to be cruel.

The second biggest excitement was the frenetic combination of all of the other six-minute-and-forty-second presentations. Swiss Miss (aka Tina Roth Eisenberg) walked us through her world and the way she graphically sees it, slipping shots of the Alpine landscape and Swiss trash bags into a barcode-like division of her day; Bodkin designer Eviana Hartman broke down what she was wearing and how it was sustainable (the bamboo, not the panda!); Deborah Fisher got everyone fired up to plant wildflowers in Brooklyn; Allegra Burnette took us on a tour through the making of MoMA’s redesigned website, something we’re a little bit familiar with; Jay Parkinson attempted to remove insurers and doctors from the medical system in favor of an online doctor-to-patient approach, appealing in theory and enraging in its reminder of how utterly screwed our existing system is; Dickson Dispommier went way past Urban Farm 1 with a look through potential vertical farms and a call to those arms; Glen Cummings didn’t talk about MTWTF’s C-Lab bootleg but could have; Eric Sanderson tugged at our I Am Legend-loving strings with a computer-aided rendering (above) of how Manhattan looked back in the day before we came to re-landscape; Daniel Perlin showed off his phone art; and Paul D. Miller, aka DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid, connected John Cage with icebergs, notation with scratching, Antarctica with graphic design.

We’ve got a recipe for tonight’s cultural cocktail, mi amors, and it is smokin’! Mix one part Paul D. Miller (DJ Spooky), one part Jonathan Harris (above, dancing with I Want You to Want Me co-creator Sep Kamvar), one part Tina Roth Eisenberg. Pour twenty slides over ten other artists for twenty seconds each, shake well for six minutes and forty seconds, let stand. Enjoy your Pecha Kucha.

Best served tonight at 8:30 (doors at 6:30) at Le Poisson Rouge.

PKNY6 [Pecha Kucha NY]

We’ll spare you a reminder of how much we love LVHRD. We won’t spare you the news that they’re running what they so cutely call a non-conference (awwww) next Saturday, March 28. And we really won’t spare you the fact that Andre and Dan of dress code, a design consortium that does lotsa jazz like branding and direction—like the new True Life opening sequence—for MTV and also their friends Joe and Becca, are the chosen architecture + design speakers. We do have to spare you the inside scoop on who some of the secret lunchtime speakers are going to be, but we might have just given you a clue.

See you there, workaplayas!

LVHRD ARCHDL PST-GM CHT [Edificial]
LVHRD ARCHDL V Winner Revealed! [Edificial]
LVHRD presents WRK/PLY [LVHRD]

Second semester into the School of Visual Arts’ D-Crit program, founded by the insanely prolific Steven Heller and the insanely lovely Alice Twemlow, and we finally figured out a way to get inside the building. The MFA in design criticism (ed: you can learn this biz?) was launched last year to great speculation and acclaim and curiosity. For one, how to teach a group of people how to do something that most of us have sort of learned in the trenches of doing? And for two, how could any of us uneducated old guard possibly survive the onslaught of more than the usual one-per-year newbies?

Last night’s excuse was a talk, given by Times perfume critic Chandler Burr, author of narrative nonfiction and edifave book The Emperor of Scent. And so we went to the 21st Street department, wedged ourselves into a penultimately back row seat complete with flip-up writing surface, and prepared to learn. If Burr is a wallflower we’re Deanna Troi, so everything was entertaining and full of giggles particularly when he described the acquisition—and testing—of civet. But the lecture, which involved smelling ten raw scents and the perfumes that used them, was also about design, and how to talk about it. Burr sees the construction of a perfume as analogous to the construction of a building; a great breakdown of Calvin Klein Secret Obsession involved a chocolate core with platforms of florals and spices coming off of it, all surrounded by a curtain wall of a synthetic.

Image: Dean Kaufman

While Ian hobnobs somewhere that involves an airplane that doesn’t have wifi (or so says he all), Official Edificial Pinch Hitter Stephen Zacks steps in with a report from an Access Restricted lecture, held in the gloriously photographed space above, to which our access was certainly restricted. Read on for extremely illuminating ruminations on the state of the city, the building of architecture, and the reality of life. Not quite synecdoches, but close enough for now.

We were in J.P Morgan’s penthouse apartment on 14 Wall Street on Wednesday night drinking wine and gazing out over the Financial District while hobnobbing with a group of architecture know-it-alls, among them the esteemed Karrie Jacobs (once upon a time sandbagged herself as editor at Dwell, which we suspect is a healthy thing for the progress of both magazines and writers), who is getting ready to pitch her next top-secret book (on silence).

To the west we saw David Childs’ subtly angled 7 World Trade, with its James Carpenter-orchestrated radiant glass and its Jenny Holzer glowing mauve text. Across the way, the unstable Deutsche Bank building (which killed two firefighters two years ago) by Shreve, Lamb and Harmon (of Empire State fame) was being literally deconstructed from the top down. North of I.M. Pei’s World Financial Center, we saw the new 43-story Goldman Sachs building by Henry Cobb topped out and promising to be as tacky as its 1970s brother but expected to win LEED Gold anyway. (Do you lose points if you keep nearly killing people during the build?) And the Gwathmey Siegel-designed W Hotel was rising on Washington Street. Looking down, the spectacular neo-gothic Trinity church and its neighboring graveyard made us deeply question our reticence about the neo-traditional. And further west we saw the World Trade Center site slowly, slowly developing.

Which made us wonder where all the supposedly terrible architecture of the Oughts is that all of the weepy silver-linings-of-recession articles are referring to. Not that there’s any great architecture there, but is it any worse than the architecture that came before? Or is it, mostly, a bit better?

RV and DSB talk the LH’s move from NJ to NY, tonight at 7 at S 4 A&A.

Lieb House: Change of Address [Storefrontnews.org]
Image [Source]

Let’s play word association. Approximately a thousand years ago, we stood with Staten Island Ferry Terminal architect Fred Schwartz on the pier of Pier 40, taking a break from the WorkAC-designed Van Alen show, The Good Life, which was curated by Official Edificial Top-Five-to-Seven Zoë Ryan, who is currently at the Art Institute of Chicago, which just got a Modern Wing designed by Renzo Piano, who also did The Morgan, and is also the best museum architect in the world. End of line.

Schwartz introduced us to Jim Venturi, filmmaker and son of accidental Godfather of Postmodernism Robert Venturi and his architect wife Denise Scott Brown, authors of Learning from Las Vegas, which is where Dave Hickey lives, and designers of buildings ranging from Princeton’s Gordon Wu Hall, which is right next door to ARO’s new-ish School of Architecture addition, to the Lieb House. End of line.

Storefront for Art and Architecture, where we used to intern, is hosting a three-day event, which they’re calling a micro-exposition, as part of their ongoing EXYZY Situation Room exhibition, which will celebrate the Lieb House’s move from New Jersey to Long Island. The event starts tonight with a talk by Fred Schwartz and Jim Venturi. End of line.

Tomorrow, Bob and Denise talk “bold little ugly banal box.” End of line.

Friday morning, a house-holding barge sails up the East River. End of line.

End of lines.

Lieb House: Change of Address [Storefront for Art and Architecture]

Renzo Piano (whose name, we think, means “quiet finishing pole” in Italian) was in Cambridge yesterday, giving it to the Harvard kids straight up no chaser. Here’s how it went down: Renzo is on the line to develop a bunch a’ projects for the university, including a renovation of the famed Fogg Museum and a new museum complex for the future Allston campus. (Read: land grab.) The latter has been put on ice for the foreseeable future in favor of other priorities, a move totally unrelated to the $8.1 billion dollar kick in the solar plexus suffered by Harvard’s endowment due to the current Financial Pigf*!k of Epic Proportions.

Tell us, Renz. Is there any good news?

“[Architecture] doesn’t only answer needs,” he said. “It answers to desires, to dreams, so it’s a very complex profession.”

Thanks a bundle! Piano was equally enlightening on the subject of the Fogg, which he predicts will be “unique”, and on the Allston project, which he described as “a great challenge.” Architects and boilerplate—for 150 years, a team you can trust.

Fogg Architect Describes Plans [Harvard Crimson]

Danny the Lyrical Libeskind went uptown on Saturday to participate in the opening salvo of the Bronx Museum’s year-long program, “Intersections: The Grand Concourse at 100”. Unfortunately, we didn’t. We went on Friday. Which was terrific, featuring as it did a panel studded with such Bronxologists as Times City editor Constance Rosenblum. La Roseblum knows from the Grand Concourse: her book, Boulevard of Dreams: Heady Times, Heartbreak, and Hope along the Grand Concourse in the Bronx, is due from NYU Press in August. She batted around the history of the Boogie Down with SUNY’s Ray Bromley and Fordham’s Mark Naison among others, peppering her talk with anecdotes about famous local buildings like the Grand Concourse Plaza Hotel and illustrious Bronxites like David Halberstam.

So, um, what happened with Libeskind? The nice thing about DL is that you can probably guess what it was without having to see it yourself: a lilting, affecting tribute, combining equal parts insight, sentiment, and outright sclock. Ashamed as we are for having missed him, we (and you) can still redeem our(your)selves. Upcoming events in the “Intersections” series include an appearance by Vito Acconci, which we do not intend to miss: like Libeskind, we know pretty much what we’re going to get, but in Acconci’s case we’ve come to expect the unexpected. Count us in.

It’s official. Back in our behind-the-scenes proto-soft-launch (which happened right before we went into soft-launch) phase, we discovered that the work-life couple comprised of Julie Lasky, now-former (foreshadowing!) editor-in-chief of I.D. and Ernest Beck, prolific writer-editor-thinker, would be taking over Design Observer’s new offshoot, Change Observer. And on Friday, we said goodbye to Julie. In person, at an event-type thing. Which involved hummus. Notables helping to say goodbye included awesome-doing criticizer Karrie Jacobs, real book (about baseball, and Rubens’ secret spy career, so far) writer Mark Lamster, Lasky’s colleagues Monica Khemsurov and managing editor Jill Singer (who, we hear, is going to be covering Julie’s job until…?), Official Edificial Top-Five-to-Seven artist Mary Ellen Carroll, and at least one excruciatingly adorable child. We know there were more, but we had to run to Deitch’s LIC outpost to look at Vanessa Beecroft-sanctioned naked ladies. (Also: Kanye West just wasn’t gonna stalk himself.)

Image courtesy Jen Bekman Gallery

It appears that our fandom of architecturally-inspired painter Sarah McKenzie has been so well documented that someone—Jen—thought it’d be a good idea to have us—Eva—talk to the artist—Sarah—in person—that would be with words—on Saturday—this weekend—at the gallery—6 Spring Street. Officially:

Join us for mimosas, pastries and sparkling conversation @ Jen Bekman Gallery this Saturday, March 7, 2009, from 10 a.m. to 12 p.m. — before the fairs!

We’ll be downing as much seltzer as we can get our hands on in preparation for that promised sparkle. But it’d be cool if you came. Yes, you. No pressure. Of course. Ha. Just. You know. A little support. Might be nice? Also the art is cool? Scratch. The art is cool. Come.

Sparkling Conversation:Sarah McKenzie + Eva Hagberg [ed: mind explosion!] [Personism]
Building Code’s Sarah McKenzie Speaks! [Edificial]