Monday, being Mean Day, is a chance for us to seethe—and for you, too! Today’s FotoShoppe objects of contempt, envy and derision are a couple of interiors we’ve recently spotted on the altogether-too-fabulous Design Sponge.

Two recent posts took us inside the execrably beautiful homes of two Boston-area designers, and we got curious about their practice. ColorTHEORY, as it’s called, is a wretchedly exquisite outfit, and founding partners Brad Dufton and Jeremy McElwain have predictably lavish, numbingly gorgeous homes. The latter’s hallway is at right.

They go too far, however, in the humiliatingly poor copy that appears on their website—someone simply has got to set the LingoWatch police on these guys, pronto. A brief sample:

colorTHEORY is a full-service, residential Interior Painting and Wallpaper hanging company, servicing Boston & its’ surrounding areas… We will work hard to ensure that our end result, is to yours and your clients’ satisfaction, each and every time.

Oh, dear, dear, dear, dear. Just for that, we’re gonna mean-up their houses. Click through, you dogs!

Jeremy McElwain [Design Sponge]
Brad Dufton [Design Sponge]

You know nothing pleases us more, beloveds, than when you send helpful tips our way. You know we love nothing more than to be introduced to architects, or designers, or design-builders, or construction magnates, or writers, or thinkers, or bloggers, or anyone who might be useful to us in our daily search to find something to teardrop into this ocean of content. And you also know we live for misspellings, errant punctuation marks, and the casual mistakes of the many.

And so, allow to introduce you to J Thomas Construction, a “design focused [sic 1] general contracting company with a steadfast commitment to quality and service.” (Because most construction firms have a wavering hookup scenario with loserdom and damage.) The particular project we were sent was a “Fort Green” [sic 2] apartment, in “Brooklyn’s artistic [ed: we’ll let that one sliiiiide] Fort Green [sic 3, now you know it’s not an accident] community.”

Unless Fort Hamilton and Greenpoint have splintered off and eloped, forming the sister neighborhood spelled above, we’re calling it for lazy editing and a slipped attention to detail. Steadfast commitment? We’re not so sure.

Nice cabinets, though. Good stuff.

Oh, isn’t this precious. Design behemoth SOM and academic powerhouse SCI-Arc are having a play date. Apparently the firm is bringing in some of their people, and some of their software, to give the kids a taste of advanced digital design techniques and a sense of what they can expect when they get called up to the majors. Or so it seems. The announcement of the collaboration, as posted on core.form-ula, is pretty rough going underfoot.

The Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc) proposes a unique partnership with the [sic] SOM to support the educational mission of the school… The following is a proposal for SOM’s sponsoring and supporting of a design computation research program with faculty and students from the Southern California Institute of Architecture… The proposal seeks to build a repeatable structure for design research collaboration with SOM that is extensible within the SCI-Arc curricular constraints.

So… SOM is gonna pitch in at SCI-Arc, right? And is the proposal really seeking such a collaboration, or are its putative collaborators? Tell us more, O Wordy One.

SCI-Arc will communicate with identified SOM personnel in a journey of investigation, discussion, design exploration and evaluation that will generate an innovative series of conceptual strategies and architectural and possibly planning design proposals and solutions.

It’s… it’s… Leaving aside the manifest inelegance of that passage, consider for a moment “identified SOM personnel.” Naturally they’re identified. What the hell else could they be? Unidentified SOM personnel? Imagine a group of SOM architects trying to maintain their anonymity for a whole semester, running around in carnival masks and affecting British accents. Read the whole announcement, it’s priceless.

One quick question, though: Why is SOM, which we know has problems of its own, moonlighting in academia? or is that precisely the reason they’re moonlighting in academia? Hmmmm?

We were going to wait until tomorrow to fully delve into the newness that will be the new MoMA website—“MoMA.org Now Integrates Social Media Tools and Enables Users to Personalize and Share Their Museum Experiences,” apparently—which will allow people to, you know, go look at art and then talk about it in an online format, lest anyone ever want to simply go to a museum with a friend and catch up about the Kippenberger (GENIUS. GO.) over a tarte flambee. But the fluorescents finally caught up with us, and we realized why we kept coming back to our announcement. Which email read:

“MoMA Launches Resigned Website March 6.”

That’s right. Not redesigned. Resigned. Either the interns are asleep or, we’re more likely to hope, somebody over there just wasn’t completely, well, on board.

Orhan Ayyüce, architect maudit and senior editor at Archinect (were you aware they had any?), has written an article for the site, cross-posted on his own blog, that gives new meaning to the phrase “not guilty by reason of insanity.” It’s an essay-cum-fever dream about the CCTV fire, and it is a sustained attempt to turn the incident, and the justifiable outrage of some Chinese observers, into a sort of improvised poetic narrative. “A robust dictator turned its back to demising beauty…” “I want to see the Yang’s Yin…” “We need fire marshals and the love stories all the same for its news value…” This is doggerel, really—second-hand Max Jacob. Ayyüce’s article is, however, totally apposite in one regard: it’s a dead-on satire of the surrealist bedtime stories Rem and wife Madelon Vriesendorp used to tell in the good old days. So: Is Orhan barking mad, or crazy like a fox?

TVCC Fire, 2/08/09 [Archinect]

Courtesy our favorite bike-riding pie-baking Cleveland-originating dance-loathing Chatwin-loving architecture writer William Bostwick, writing over at core77, How (Not) To Write Like a Designer: 5 tricks you didn’t learn in studio. Confusing capitalization aside, it’s an absolutely necessary piece of written reading for people who want to learn how to write good and do other stuff good too.

Bostwick’s five tricks:

1. Use your skills. 2. Kill jargon. (ed: Faster! Faster! Kill! Kill! Kill!) 3. Tell a story. 4. Don’t be afraid to put yourself into your writing. 5. Finally, and most importantly, don’t say too much.

OK, hold on, we’re gearing up to give our own drivel a look. For 1: Fast and loose typing combined with a predilection for bad puns, check. For 2: Absence of radical re-dynamicalization of non-specific site-specificity within a complexitudinal longevity axis, check. For 3: This one time we were hired to do a blog, it was so funny!, check. For 4: Hello, world, check. For 5: Rats. Fail.

How (Not) To Write Like a Designer: five tricks you didn’t learn in studio [Core77]

Get ‘em while they’re hot! ‘em being a chance to see Danny Libeskind, live, large, and hella in charge at the Center for Architecture. TONIGHT! As none of us will be able to attend, we ask first for any eagle-eyed watchers to send in their reports, and second for a moment of patience while we parse the descriptive text. Let’s see what sly secrets are embedded within, shall we?

“Architect Daniel Libeskind first gained world-wide attention when his haunting, zig-zag-shaped Jewish Museum opened in Berlin in 1999.” Technically, the nauseau-inducing building didn’t fully open—as a museum with exhibitions—until September 9, 2001. And we should probably define “world-wide attention.” (Architecture school kudos doesn’t count.) Which leads us to….

“After his dramatic urban design plan for Ground Zero was selected by city and state officials in 2002, Libeskind became a household name in America.” The decision was certainly dramatic, as were plans like a wedge of light (which fell on the site at exact commemorative moments except when, uh, it didn’t) and a 1776-foot tall tower, but most dramatic were the behind-the-scenes boardroom—we heard about a fracas or two—negotiations Danny had to do with his Silverstein-introduced SOM partners. As for the household name, we are not a census bureau and therefore not overtly qualified to comment, but let’s just say that if we had a book of Danny’s poetry for every time we were asked just what was gonna happen when they rebuilt the twin towers, we’d be well-stocked with lines like “Totalitarianism is a magnificent idea which will eventually destroy the supremacy of White Biology. But a successful portrait of Jesus cannot be as beautiful as a painting depicting the sycamore tree unto which he swooped.”

“Now with his first work of architecture to be realized in the U.S., an addition to the Denver Art Museum, the American public has a chance to examine his unconventional talents.” Unconventional! Knock us over with a dangerous cantilever of Canadian design!

“In this filmed tour of the Denver Art Museum’s Hamilton Building, Libeskind explains his unusual, titanium-clad, shard-like building.” Unusual! Knock us over with a cancelled spiral of a London museum!

“The dazzling geometry we see on the exterior is reflected inside to provide spectacular spaces and arresting angles for viewing contemporary art.” Not to be picky about how we look at art, but the last time Danny built a wall at an “arresting angle,” all the artists whose work was meant to be hung at similarly “arresting angles” and all the curators who had to hang that work at “arresting angles” were pretty much wishing Danny’s work would get “arrested, angularly.”

“The sculptural building of fractured planes insouciantly claims its status as a major landmark in American museum architecture.” Ah, the nonchalance of chatty architecture.

Films and Conversations with Architects: Daniel Libeskind [Bustler]

Just in from our best friends to the north, a proposal from University of British Columbia faculty members Mari Fujita and Matthew Soules to turn the practically perfect (water-on-one-side, mountains-on-the-other) Pacific Rim city of Vancouver into an EcoMetropolis (we’re guessing that’s TM.) As The Tyee reports, essentially, EcoMetropolitanism (and again), is based on seven ideas for turning the city from boringly semi-natured into a “literal urban jungle.” That means a longer “habitat skirt,” (already installed at the Vancouver Convention Center), an embrace of squirrels that goes beyond giving them a little green spot in between the streets, and a re-thinking of that whole “private property” idea.

There’s a lot of jargon in the piece—conflates, synergizes, micro-fiefdom, interconnected, paradigm-shift, influential design journal Praxis—but Fujita and Soules are pretty aware of the implausibility of their scheme and seem pretty much just stoked to have it out there. Reminds us a bit of an old project our favorite Lower East Siders WORKac did for an ultimately tragically dust-biting Ian Schrager development in Vegas, what with its total green integration and desire to have nature be more than a spot-check, and it also reminds us that as much as puppies and kittens are neat, so too are bald eagles and barnacles. And KY-oats.

Is Your City Boring? Make it Wild [The Tyee]

Jeffrey Kipnis is good people. Really. Back in the late ’80s, he helped steer Philip Johnson away from Po-Mo. The Ohio State professor’s southern lilt and folksy charm, combined with his theoretical chops, have earned him well-deserved praise, and made him a SymposiumSuperstar the whole family can love.

BUT.

This aggression will not stand. From the June 2007 Record, speaking of Corbu’s posthumous Eglise Saint-Pierre de Firminy-Vert:

“Whatever your reaction to the church is, you cannot deny that you are in the presence of a flagrantly unforgettable architectural opus. Yet, as you depart and think back on how often the architecture of the church transported you to the brink of transcendence only to drag you back to the worldly realm, you might find yourself wondering if it is not somehow locked in a schizophrenic struggle with itself.”

Again, same article:

“Although you cannot know what the door means or represents, it insists that you think about it, and the intellectual demand of its conceptual abstraction yanks you back from the realm of the sacred to the secular.”

Why do I bring this up? Here’s a teaser from Kipnis’ essay for the Greg Lynn monograph published this past fall:

“This project [Embryological House], which set into motion a process yielding innumerable variations that construct a formal family from a kit of parts while circumventing any referent to an ideal primitive, went a good distance toward demonstrating proof of concept.”

No one would call this passage musical, but at least it’s a tough-minded specimen of academic prose. It isn’t easy to understand Lynn’s work, and Kipnis plainly knows what he’s talking about (even if we don’t).

The question is: How do we square the heady academic with the “flagrantly unforgettable” magazine writer? Lynn turns Kipnis into Mr. Spock, but Corbu makes him a swooning, punch-drunk romantic.

Sure, he could be hamming it up for the audience in the popular press, and then putting on his thinking cap for the monograph. But maybe, just maybe, the volcanic, Emersonian Kipnis of the Record is the real one. He wouldn’t be the first steely architectural scholar with the soul of a (rotten) poet…

Also, query: Is he any relation to heavy-duty feminist writer Laura Kipnis? Hmmm?

A universal (but largely unacknowledged) truth about architects is that they a) can’t write and b) believe they can. B) occurs mostly because of a slightly lax attitude towards words—the faith that words will, with the simple addition of often unnecessary letters and suffixes (viz: dynamical, structuralistic), become just that much … cooler. Below, a lecture series description recently spotted in the halls of Princeton University’s School of (Paper) Architecture.