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]

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.

Image: Don Emmert/AFP/Getty

As everyone here experienced or read about or saw or felt, it was seven and a half years ago that the Lower Manhattan towers fell, and a labyrinthine and frequently bonkers process of power grabbing and forcible removal, public competitions and private dealings, murmurs and rumors, began. All in the name of rebuilding, all for the force of healing. For a few short years, all everyone ever talked about was what would or might happen, and then, over a few short months, the chatter subtly died, replaced with speculations about the High Line, the MoMA tower, the future of the death of the expensive glass box.

All the while, relatively unobserved, work chugged along. The Freedom Tower—Tower One to you, Sir!—was designed and engineered, the temporary PATH station opened, and surprise among surprises, progress was made. Still, they asked us what was happening. Would the towers be rebuilt? Where was the money coming from? Was the tower really going to be that high and that tall?

David Dunlap has the answers, and the New York Times an interest in expanding their multimedia platforms. Just this morning the bow-tied reporter—whose pen was out and notebook in hand at every press event during the earlier headier days, so boyfriend knows what he’s talking about—inaugurated what will be a series of videos covering construction for the next few years (just in case anyone was worried about the Times’ public stance on their future). And it was good.

It’s no Project Rebirth—a video work devoted to documenting the entire World Trade Center reconstruction through twelve cameras that have been on and running since 2001 and will continue until at least 2015—but Dunlap’s coverage is a ground-up and reported and welcome addition to Rebirth’s artiness and image saturation and placenta-evoking (sorry!) name. Let’s just hope the Financial Pigf*ck of Epic Proportions doesn’t rain on anyone’s lens.

When Are They Going to Build the New World Trade Center? Just Look Up [New York Times]
Trailer [Project Rebirth]

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?

Core77’s Allan Chochinov, upon whom we have lavished praise in posts past, has pointed us to an essay by Design Observer’s Jessica Helfand, who’s likewise been the object of some admiration in these pages. Jessica’s subject: Facebook. And what an uncanny coincidence that is.

Writes Jessica,

For anyone under the age of, say thirty or so, the whole notion of open-source thinking is a native habitat that can be applied to everything from group-table seating in restaurants to sharing playlists to data clouds…

Quite. With equal parts wit and insight, Jessica’s article teases out the divers complexities and contradictions that attend this networked culture, in which we create and recreate a series of public personae for ourselves via the internet. The word “design” does not appear in her article; it doesn’t have to. She’s writing about nothing less than the design of life.

Turns out, the very perception of what is public versus what is private is a fundamentally generational conceit.

Again, swell. But as it happens, we—some of we, anyway—are late to the party. We just joined Facebook this week. (Note the conspicuously absent link in that last line.)

We’ve been reluctant to do so, despite the fact that we belong to the very generation that Jessica impugns with an instinctive facility for the kind of socialization that Facebook was made for. Like beads of mercury, persons of our age cohort are supposed to glom together into a single digital body, sharing, over-sharing, ditching outmoded standards of privacy. So where the hell have we been keeping ourselves?

We’re not gonna dwell on this. If we were ever to become phenomenally wealthy, finding ourselves with a lot of spare time and little actual work, we, too, would probably develop a host of enthusiasms which with the advantage of our surplus energies we might be able to carry beyond the level of mere hobbies. Taxidermy, for example. Ham radios. The pigeon fancy. No one would think the less of us—except for the legions of dedicated cote keepers, hams, and taxidermists who would accuse us of poaching on their turf. So when Brad Pitt marches up Capitol Hill to talk about his high-design schemes for New Orleans reconstruction, it’s not surprising that some architects get testy. Blogger Ted Wells has something to say to them: Cool it. We agree—but God help us, if Gwyneth Paltrow starts writing design criticism, we’re suing Peter Arnell.

Brad Wants to Be an Architect [ArchDaily]

With the acknowledgement that discussing money is so terribly, terribly gauche (for William Norwich told us so), we bring you Coroflot’s 2008 Design Salary Survey. Bear in mind that was before the crash, so it’s all a portrait of a reasonable time, a softer time, a time in which architects and interior designers and even graphic designers made fair-to-quite-fair livings from their sketches and drawings and models and ideas. A time in which—wait a second—the low income average for architects was $15K, the high $240K (!), in comparison to the high mark of $970K for industrial designers and a cool mil for interaction designers. Most surprising is that only 58% of architect respondents hold a BA, as opposed to 74%, 79%, and a whopping 84% for interior design, industrial design, and graphic design, respectively. And while we are certain that correlation in no way implies causation, there seems to be a link between being an interaction designer and being a hotshot. In the meantime, WASPs, step away from the post.

Coroflot Design Salary Survey [Coroflot, via Core77]

Dear Every Design Blogger on the Globe: Congratulations! You may already be a winner. A brief mention on Edifavorite radio program Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me led us to this story posted on PsychCentral, titled “Can Blogging Make You Happier?” Killing the suspense, author John M. Grohol, Psy.D. begins by telling us, “According to researchers in Taiwan, the answer is ‘Yes.’” Thank you, Taiwan!

Revealed in scientific studies by these intrepid Chinese nationalists is the hidden link between social connectedness and feeling hunky dory about yourself. 596 college students largely between the ages of 16 and 22 can’t be wrong: the sample group reported in self-administered surveys an increase in happiness corresponding to their increase in blogging. Mostly, these blogs were of the omphalocentric, Pink Floyd-lyric-quoting variety; it was not reported whether any design bloggers were among the test subjects.

But we’ll say this much: Though design blogging is blast-tastic, it seems rather doubtful that writing about something, rather than oneself, could be in any way therapeutic. Of course, any blog you can name that’s about architecture or its allied fields is bound to have a personal element. But catharsis? That’s why god invented polyurethane fried egg stressed toys.

Can Blogging Make You Happier? [PsychCentral]

We’re going to admit it. We’re going to say it. Just give us a second to gather the courage, remove the self-consciousness, find our convictions to stand behind.

Yesterday, we saw He’s Just Not That Into You.

And we are, in a way, that into it.

Mostly because of the, ahem, Role of Design. The slight strangeness of its Baltimore location aside, the movie plays with architecture and design in a way that bridges the architecture-makes-you-cool overtness of a film like, say, My Super Ex-Girlfriend (Luke Wilson is architect and therefore attractive) and the grittily appealing sets of Addicted to Love. Unfortunately, He’s Just Not That Into You plays houses and their decor as one-to-one metaphor for its characters and their inner lives. A quick run-down:

Jennifer Connelly’s cuckolded housewife of a character is mid-renovation and obsessed with Dwell. An early scene shows her, sitting alone on a half-tarped couch, alone and flipping through the pages and therefore, clearly, lonely and sad. Husband arrives, flings the magazine on the floor. She doesn’t need it. She has him. (Too bad he has Scarlett Johansson.)

Jennifer Aniston and Ben Affleck split a cool loft that has a painting with the word Should repeated all over it. This is metaphor.

Justin Long lives in a loft that has restaurant fittings in the kitchen. They are spare and steel. This is because he is a spare man of steel emotions, and is, at least until the last three minutes, extremely afraid to let anyone in, lest they hurt him/achieve intimacy/pick-your-garden-variety. So he hides in a labyrinth of “that was fun” and “I’m just not that into you.” A labyrinth exactly like his loft layout!

We try not to get too involved in saving the world—we can only save ourselves, after all—but we’re finding it hard to resist heading to our rooftops and shouting for all of Brooklyn to hear that today, we do not want to throw away. Sea change courtesy our LA-based soul sister Alissa Walker, who not only live-blogged every single moment of last week’s Compostmodern conference, but today sums it all up with a perfect moment of Urgent Reflections. Essentially, as she reports, conference moderator Joel Makower said we’ve got “about 5000 days left to figure this out,” and two have already passed. As Alissa says Joel said:

No one’s talking about what the world will look like if things go right. Design is a very storytelling-oriented medium and visualizing that future and learning from it could be something designers own. In our own lifetimes, we used to all think that it was okay to throw things away. We used to not think twice about it. And look as us now, we’ve already come so far.

We already wear the same thing every day (who needs more than one scarf??). But, should you suddenly see us blogging via recycled notepad carrier-rat delivered to your water-bottle yurt, you’ll know why.

Compostmodern 09: Urgent Reflections and All Posts in One Place [Core 77]

Edificial fave design busybodies Design Glut (combining the grace and power of Liz Kinnmark with the power and grace of Kegan Fisher) posted an intriguing interview earlier this week with digital octopus Josh Spear. You know Josh Spear: he lives in your head.

Spear, a founding partner of internet idea lab Undercurrent, is one of those persons who can only be described by portmanteaux: culturepreneur, new mediator, networkaholic. As the Eskimos for snow, contemporary culture has many names for the Josh Spears who seem to take an ever larger role in its production, a role that includes thinking up more and more grating neologisms by which to call themselves.

Excuse us. We have issues. It’s just that, sometimes, we have our doubts about the value of internet network culture as a vehicle and a model for design. All the designers out there tweeting away ought to consider reading Will Leitch’s piece on Twitter in last week’s New York. (By the way—Christ—New York just dropped out of the Magazine Publishers of America. Sound the alarm!) As Leitch demonstrates, the internet, while certainly here to stay, is still something that in its present state we could all feel mighty embarrassed about a few years hence. And when we see design critics writing about how to get internet famous, or effectively positing that pursuit as a viable engine for design practice, we can’t help but say, “Good grief.”

Of course, we’re not beyond reproach ourselves: perhaps you haven’t noticed, but this is a blog. And naturally networks can and should inform contemporary architecture and design. (So says Kazys Varnelis and Mark Wigley and practically everybody else.) But, darling Design Glut, be not charmed by silver-tongued junket-loving media mavens! Google hits do not a designer make.