In June of last year, Marisa Bartolucci, a freelance writer and editor and prolific contributor to the kind of books that are multi-authored and generally general (American Contemporary Furniture, by Marisa Bartolucci, Cathy Lang Ho, Raul Cabra, and Dung Ngo, Michael Graves by Julie V. Iovine, Raul Cabra, Marisa Bartolucci, etc), was handed the speculative reins of a new design magazine, hatched in the Hachette Filipacchi nest of Metropolitan Home. It was called Fulcrum. It was something to do with contract design. And it was, sadly, misguided.

Word on the street was that Bartolucci spent almost her entire budget on a brand identity and magazine-and-website design by 2x4, the New York-based interdisciplinary design studio that inaugurated the Art Institute of Chicago’s Construction series with their literally punctuative Pause wallpaper. They’re super badass, generally, but Marisa should have listened to the commas. And paused. Before launching, with great fanfare, a website that looked like a cross between a wordpress blog and a Fotoshoppe feature. Even today, noodling around in search of something to grab onto to write about, we’re discovering that it’s an incredibly difficult-to-navigate site. We want to find the masthead, figure out who the writers are, find some entry point besides a list of titles that scroll down in presumably reverse-time order. Points for the always-briliant and recently tile-tastic Jen Renzi’s contributions, but there isn’t even a (clear) way to search for her byline.

So maybe it isn’t a surprise that a letter from Marisa (who, full disclosure, we briefly attempted to work on a Fulcrum story with) just made its way around the internet-scape, which helpfully sent it our way (Gold Star!). With a subject line reading “Fulcrum Update,” which is a bit like “HR Call — Moving Forward” or “We Feel You’d Be Happier Elsewhere,” the sad news:

A few weeks ago, fed up with the fact that Surface is now six months behind in paying us (sorry, guys, it’s public shaming time) while CITY took a good five months to get around to cutting a check for our last column, annoyed that editors treat paying us like a favor—if we hear the “oh yeah… sorry, it’s such a drag, we’re so slow” one more time, we’re gonna start dragging our feet on, you know, writing and filing words (it’s such a pain we know, yeah, mkaaaay)—and generally outraged at the treatment we and our fellows have received, we asked for a little more bitchslapping to make the uninsured world go around.

And then, of course, Gawker stole our thunder. So, now, we’ll borrow their results, helpfully laid out in a nifty little Rachel Harrison-style pink (to make it pretty!) chart. The takeaway? The Brooklyn Paper is by far the worst offender with Michael Klug’s Whitewall coming in a close second. Given what we’ve heard about Whitewall—that they tried to negotiate a freelancer’s rate down after accepting the story for publication, claiming general poverty and craptasticness—we’re unsurprised that they are more than 350 days (that’s almost a year, just to drive the point home) overdue. Three non-design magazines down the rung and Surface checks in with an average lag of about nine months, which makes our 180-day (that’s after the contractual 90) wait seem like a walk in the Spacecraft 2.

Let’s bring it on home. Speaking of print, how’s Print doing? I.D. paying you? What about Record? Architectural Digest still cutting mad checks? Any of the Nasties holding back? Tips(at)edificial(dot)com or commentate that justified anger. Let’s get these guys feeling a little less like God, and a little more like Martin.

Pay It Forward (Or at All) [Edificial]
Print’s Ten Worst Late Payment Offenders [Gawker]
Image [Flickr]

Resolved: Developer Bruce Ratner’s Frank Gehry designed Atlantic Yards project in Brooklyn, having gone through manifold visions and revisions beyond all powers of human reckoning, and confronting at every turn the stiff opposition of increasingly sanctimonious local refuseniks, is now the most exhausted, the most irrelevant, the most diversionary development story in these United States. Affirmation: Who gives a goddamn anymore? Negation: A lot of people.

The New York press, for example, which has scrutinized every scrap and tittle of info with the insight and probity we expect from professional news organizations. Case in point, The Daily News, whose story this morning reports that Gehry’s statements yesterday claiming the project was “not going to happen” first appeared in “The Architect Times”, a dilly of a typo for our own beloved The Architect’s Newspaper. The Daily Times went on to say that developers are, no surprise, not really digging on Gehry’s jazz, to which they were not hip at all and think the whole scene is like still very swinging.

But the project, which once portended either a new birth for the borough or urban Armageddon (depending upon your tax bracket), has become a total distraction. The locals can till the ground with salt, if that’s what they want. Forest City Ratner can take it on the arches, or build something somewhere else that we actually need—like, shoot, contiguous six story apartment buildings. Can the rest of us please talk about something else now?

Frank Gehry, Atlantic Yards Officials backpedal on Architect’s Comments [Daily Times]

Once more, a big firm is getting well on taxpayer money for a dumb project. First there was Conant Architects’ renovation job for bailed-out Citibank; now our partners in crime-fighting Above the Law are reporting on HOK’s $359 million Marlins Stadium in Miami. Owner Jeffrey Loria is using gobs of Miami-Dade dollars to build the park. Presumably, federal bucks will have to make up for the county’s budget shortfall, so we all take a bath. HOK, as Paul Goldberger observed, has “cornered the market in sports facilities”—so if there was going to be a stimulus stadium boondoggle, it was bound to involve HOK. Of course, Barney Frank is not coming after principal David Alexander with a pitchfork, but other designers should consider it. This recession was supposed to make architects into civic heroes. Building stadiums for robber barons ain’t gonna endear the profession to the public.

More Pork to the Fattest Pig in Town [ATL]

Is this normal? From Craigslist:

$3400 / 2br - I will PAY YOU $1,500 to SIGN & take this YOO by Starck/no securtity

That’s the Financial District YOO, by the by, not to be confused with its 23rd St. pendant. The question is: Do they have to pay people to take leases in designer buildings these days? Has this always been the case? or is this the sound of desperation? Either way, we hope no one mentions it to Philippe. It might be a blow to his already wounded self-esteem.

Architects, architects, architects. When will you stop getting tangled in public embarrassments? Conant Architects has been caught with their hand in the communal till: As designers of Citibank’s just-announced $10 million plan to renovate executive suites, the architects, whose portfolio includes Café St. Bart’s and Donghia’s Mount Vernon headquarters, would effectively be paid with federal bailout dollars. (‘Cause Citibank doesn’t have any dollars of its own.) For shame, principal Peter Conant, formerly of Swanke Hayden Connell! You’ll rue the day you left nine years ago to start your own practice with offices on East 42nd St. and a longstanding relationship with Citibank. (Of course, SHC recently designed offices for Moody’s. Everybody gets dirty.)

Citigroup Said to Commit $10 Million for New Executive Suite [Bloomberg]

Just over a month ago, surprisingly frequent appearance-maker Rem Koolhaas’ Beijing tower caught fire. It was spectacular. Not in a Philippe de Montebello destruction-as-masterpiece sort of way, but in a fire-is-really-big-and-scary, particularly when caught on camera as part of the current era of instanteous newsiness, sort of way. As the Architect’s Newspaper points out, they’re just not sure they’re gonna be able to build it back up, buttercup. A few things—the height of the towers and their hotel-room structure that allowed for more structural columns throughout—seem to be on the side for saving. But others—people might not want to spend time in a building with that kind of deathtrap history, the required structural reinforcements might make the hotel virtually unusable—are on the side for not. Given the responsibility we give engineers to make safe buildings—Leslie Robertson bore the brunt of much (and self-) criticism when the towers fell—it seems, and the Newspaper reports, that it’ll be far less in the hands of the accountants, and far more in the hands of the engineers. Which is good, given that in today’s economic climate, there’s just not all that much to account.

Still Standing [Architect’s Newspaper]
Image [Flickr]

Three and a half years ago, Peter Eisenman’s Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio reopened after a short break and almost $16 million dollars in Arup-engineered renovations. The reason for the rebuild? A leaky skylight. Forty-degree temperature upswings. Mumbles went around that the Center’s director barely survived an office flood and required a constant bucket rotation. It wasn’t good for the art. Or anyone in the building. So Arup came in, noodled around, and fixed it all up. The architecture’s still essentially the same—those 89-degree columns probably didn’t have nothing to do with our persistent vertigo—but just more workable, more practical. Sort of more doing what architecture’s meant to do, and what separates it from art: creating shelter, having function, fulfilling its purpose.

Sadly, weather knows no state lines or dinosaur differentiation. Frank Gehry’s Art Gallery of Ontario, the Globe and Mail reports, “designed as an impregnable fortress against the harsh Canadian weather, is already showing cracks in its armour.” James Bradshaw paints a picture:

On Tuesday, a reporter found three buckets catching water on the central stairway that wriggles its way from the second floor of Walker Court up to the fifth-floor contemporary gallery. One bucket was three quarters full and catching a steady drip. The winding flat banisters were occasionally draped with small towels absorbing drips, and in two places, a small amount of water was pooling on the banisters unattended. A series of seven portable fans were connected by extension cord and strategically placed to try to dissipate some of the condensation, but appeared to be having little effect. And duct tape can be found partially covering the vents below the windows in an attempt to increase the force of the air flowing up from them.

Oh, Frank. This is a lot to handle—a few days after your eightieth birthday, during the divorce from half of your staff—but it sounds like it was just a few leaky Italian windows and not much more. We’re hoping that’s what it was. Because we’ve always stood behind your contributions to architecture, not art, and we’ve always supported your buildings as buildings and experiences, not sculpture, and we’ve always believed that your impact on the capital-A world of Architecture has been necessary, far beyond the scope of picture and rendering. And you know we don’t like to be wrong.

In case there’d been any last vestige of hope that maybe things weren’t quite as bad as we might have thought, the Record brings word, via ArchNewsNow, that the AIA reported an all-time Architectural Billings Index low for the month of January. Reflecting a 9-12 month time lag until construction (it takes a while for billable sketches to become poured concrete, after all), this is now the twelfth straight month of decrease. Here’s to the stims coming through.

Architectural Billings Index Hits All-Time Low [Architectural Record]

With Eva weaving dizzily around the room, the sure-footed Will Bostwick steps in once more to set the world aright. Godspeed, William.

Years ago I would cut out Eames chairs from Design Within Reach catalogs and tape them on my dorm room wall. “Someday.” Now the catalogs have gone from glossy to newsprint—changes are afoot. The rumor is, good ol’ DWR is up for sale.

Brief re-cap: My wall-collaging days were DWR’s best. Things went downhill in 2006, when their CFO jumped ship as news of big losses sloshed over the transom. You may remember last summer’s warehouse sales—not a great sign. Now with even more losses, and another CFO gone as of November, Reuters reports they’ve hired an investment banking firm to help them negotiate “strategic options.” Dun-dun-DUUNNN!

This week, DWR’s CEO himself, Ray Brunner, tried to calm fears on DWR’s blog. The rumors are true: “We did receive an offer, it is being considered and other interested parties may submit competing offers.” But don’t worry about it. They’re saving money by shipping everything from the US, and are even planning on expanding with kitchen and bathroom lines coming out this spring (like Tools for Living, launched in November).

But the statement, of course, ends with a big-ass disclaimer of a dozen or so reason why none of that will ever happen because, haven’t you heard, the financial apocalypse is here, and no one cares about design, and everything’s ruined. But as long as they keep printing catalogs, we’ll always have our dreams.

Chicago’s revised bid for the 2016 Olympics, as revealed by the Tribune, is a real downer. No sense of plan or place, just an elaborate high-rise campground wedged between the the lake, the city, and the train tracks. The Trib has a theory: Olympic Village design consultants SOM got sidelined in favor of a design-by-committee approach led by the bureaucrats of the Chicago 2016 organizing committee. It gets worse. The hospital complex that will be demolished to make way for the Olympic Village was designed by Walter Gropius, and the rest of the facilities are to be plopped into a 19th century Frederick Law Olmsted park. Chicago definitely needs help. That village looks like hand-me-down Corbu via mid-century South Beach.

Chicago’s Olympic Village Plans Lack Creative Sparkle [Chicago Tribune]

Yesterday, OMA’s CCTV-neighboring hotel in Beijing caught fire. According to a Beijing fire official, according to Xinhua News Agency, according to the Times, “a fireworks company had been hired to ignite several hundred large firecrackers in an open space outside the building, the Mandarin Oriental Hotel, which was under construction.” Smart. Sensible. (CCTV has since apologized.) Huffington Post has a few videos and a nod towards the fact that this seems to be getting clamped down in terms of local coverage, but some Beijing bloggers aren’t slowing down. International Herald Tribune reports:

“This tragedy has become a comedy on the Internet,” said a writer who called himself Foxshuo. “This is not a vulgarity but the ventilation of people’s emotion. It’s the same as seeing a bully fall down.”

Which, okay, brings us back around to the whole buildings-as-symbol thing, the anthropomorphizing that happens of big looming towers (“look, they’re looming, they’re evil”) versus the cutesifying of more, well, manageable architecture (“look, it’s curvy! it’s organic and sweet!”).

OMA’s tower catching on fire is in no way the ventilation of an emotion; it is, as much as we have our Rem quibbles and our hilariously commentated blue styrofoam jokes (gold star!), just a tragedy.

Fire Ravages Renowned Building in Beijing [New York Times]
CCTV Headquarters Fire: Rem Koolhaas Tower in Beijing Goes Up In Flames [Huffington Post]
CCTV apologizes for fireworks that burned Beijing hotel [International Herald Tribune]

Being an architect is often pretty suck-tastic—late hours, years spent drawing window sashes, the occasional bout with putative lordlessness—which is why we’ve always seen Britain’s Stirling Prize as one of those wonderful moments of appreciation for the insanity of our brothers-and-sisters-in-sort-of-arms’ lives. And now it’s gone. Or, it will be. Soon. What’s terrible is that it isn’t just one of those “so sorry, but you know, the economy” things, but, rather, just a touch punitive. The Royal Institute of British Architects, which gives the yearly prize, is apparently unthrilled by what (they speculate) the twenty thousand pounds have been used for. Which is parties. Wild, crazy, orgiastic, multi-designer parties. Like the kind Will Alsop’s might have been, except, according to the Guardian, he has no idea what it cost. But that’s besides the point, Alsop, architect of that crazy Toronto building above so you probably get an idea of the kind of parties he’d throw, says: “Some of the other winners may well have used it for parties, and why not? There’s a cash prize for the Turner and the Booker prize. Why shouldn’t there be money for architects?”

Party’s over for British architects[The Guardian]

It seems, lately, not entirely unlikely and in fact quite terrifyingly likely that we’re moving ever-closer to a world even closer to the day-after-tomorrow reality of William Gibson’s brain, evidenced in his—read them—books like Neuromancer and Pattern Recognition and Spook Country. We thought this was just us, endemic of a personal failure (ahem, unwillingness) to accept the fact that our Blackberry always knows exactly where we are and so too, therefore, does The Man, or that actually turning on our MacBook every morning is an extremely sluggish and rudimentary way of interfacing with the world. But then we read this New York story about day traders playing the market, and it was—with the way they read “dragonfly dojis” and “abandoned babies” into the colored ups-and-downs of the anthropomorphized market—just a little bit too deck cowboy Case, a little bit too close to future-fearing home. We put it aside, though, secure in the faith that they—the tek-mology developers of the world—couldn’t possibly come up with anything else in the meantime. And then they did.

DesignWeek’s Emily Pacey gets into Google’s GDrive, a “cloud-computing” system rumored to be launching soon that’ll store files and programs and applications in the ether of the internet, minimizing the need for physical space in computers and so maximizing the total futurism of our oncoming tomorrows. Pacey talks to Samsung creative manager Clive Goodwin, and Bill Moggridge, co-founder of Ideo (and designer of the first laptop computer ever!), and the net result is that this is kind of freaky to remove the whole emotionally-connected physicality of it (when our last computer died, suddenly and without warning, it screamed and we cried) and also that people tend to be conservative about things like money and their schedules, which’ll reduce the likelihood of total dependence on this invisible system. At the same time, kinetically ultra-thin screens are out there, and Samsung is on its way towards unveiling the world’s first mobile phone with projector.

The tech is making our head spin, but it’s the design that’s the point, and this trajectory is both expanding and exploding what we see as “design” into something much more ephemeral. Design isn’t about making an object have a certain shape that gives us a certain reaction (or, viz. the super-normal, doesn’t). It’s about controlling and shaping the universe as we experience it, and it encompasses everything from how we roll out of bed in the morning to the way in which we open and then type on our computers. Some of our documents are organized; some of them aren’t. Both options constitute a design act. So what are we going to do once we can’t touch our computer in the same way, can’t look across the room at our laptop and name it, begin to see it as a character? As tech gets more and more abstracted and cyberspace ever more manifest, it’s going to be a different world. And so, in (please make it!) Zoolander 2, the files are gonna be in the … where?

What will Google’s GDrive mean for computer design? [DesignWeek]
Stock-Surfing the Tsunami [New York Magazine]

As promised, the delivery of a little claw-tooth into House & Home’s totally weirdo headline “Iraqi Architect Designs Futuristic Faucet.” Our first thought, of course, was that it must be Zaha. And then we kicked ourselves for that being our immediate go-to response, for what we suddenly saw as our lack of imagination, or inspiration, or, frankly, knowledge of another Iraqi architect. And so we spiraled down into ignorance and its non-bliss, until we clicked on the story and saw that, in fact, the prolific and generally wonderful Stephen Milioti was writing about Hadid. So why the fritzy headline? Her name’s a much bigger draw than “Iraqi architect.” We’re not blaming Stephen—writers never do their own headlines, after all—but we’re curious. Tom? Noel? Any insight? We’re dying to know. Because, really, what’s next? Californian Titanium-Slinger? British Title-Loser? What’s going on with our reality train??

Signed,
New York Blogger

We took a break from filling out our Tier 36 (Totally Unskilled Migrant) general application only to be blindsided by news of the entirely backwards idea that highly skilled UK residents move here. “Is moving to the USA an option for architects?” Building Design titularly asks. Mostly it’s thanks to the Great Obama Train-Building Train that moving to the US in search of architectural employment is even crossing those pursed British lips, but writer Katie Puckett takes a whirlwind tour through the acronymic nature of the profession this side of the pond and points out that, well, it might be a bit more trouble than it’s worth.

Here’s a real-life example from a project meeting in Florida: “Once the site is platted, the AOR can ask the DCA to send an ADA so we can go ahead with the DRI.” That translates as: “Once the site boundaries have been registered, the Architect of Record can ask the Department of Community Affairs to forward an Application for Development Approval so we can apply for status as a Development of Regional Impact.”

Is moving to the USA an option for architects? [Building Design]

Moscow’s Red October Chocolate Factory, as observed by one local rag, is a touch of Willy Wonka in the heart of the Russian capital. The twelve acre site, at the tip of a peninsula in the Moscow River, was slated for redevelopment in 2007 after the 19th century factory was shuttered pursuant to a new municipal ordinance banning all industry within the city limits. Guta Group, the banking conglom that owns the property, selected oddly un-web-sited McAdam Architects to round up eight firms to turn the defunct chocolatier’s bulky brick plant into a series of luxury apartments; McAdam came back with a sampler of international delights, including Foster & Partners, Ateliers Jean Nouvel, and Jan Stormer Partners.

All was sweet and dandy until a little less than a week after the firms were announced, when Guta’s offices were raided by Russian federal authorities on suspicion of embezzlement. Despite reports of paper shredding and a nasty scuffle between police and Guta security guards, the whole thing seems, in the grand tradition of Russian justice, to have been swept neatly under the carpet.

But two years later Guta has come a cropper—or at least it might have, depending upon whom you ask. James McAdam has claimed in statements to the British media that the credit crisis will oblige Guta to put the Red October revamp on hold for at least three years. Foster chief executive Mouzhan Majidi is insisting that the project will be back in form next month. Nouvel and Stormer have thus far been conspicuously silent.

McAdam, as Guta’s top man on the project, is plainly the more reliable source, and given the bank’s obviously un-unbesmirched record of honest dealings it would seem odd that they should make up a liquidity snafu if they didn’t actually have one. Foster, meanwhile, has a fairly sizable Russian practice, and might not care to let on to his creditors that it’s slowing down. On the other hand, Foster is so rich he designs airplanes and then flies them for fun. The likely explanation is that Foster’s people have had the good sense to keep the goons from Guta at arm’s length, and consequently have no idea what the hell’s going on.

Foster’s Denies Red October Is Shelved [Building Design]

Last week we rapped a couple knuckles, indulged in a little judgement. The problem, you see and we hope to understand, was that there were certain people whom we might have expected to show up to see our beloved Ada Louise speak, and they didn’t, which disappointed us as it was not how things were supposed to go. But we offered a challenge, a chance for reprieve. Which Battlestar Galactica character, we asked, was Ms. Huxtable most like? Today’s winning entry:

The obvious choice is Roslyn, of course, but I’d like to make a case for Six…or maybe even Gaeta. Furthermore, just to amuse myself, I’d like to think of her as one of the pilots…Flattop maybe or Chuckles. But that’s only because the thought of Ada Louise being Chuckles is too funny not to consider.

It finally happened. The old broad has lost the plot at last. Not only has Martha Stewart, in conjunction with editorial director Kevin Sharkey, cooked up a maniacally spartan interior design scheme for her new offices in Chelsea, but she’s begun to launch flipped-out hissy missiles at Gawker for talking about it. The design strictures include, quoth Martha Moments,

the removal of all personal trash receptacles from individual work stations in favour [sic] of a central trash/recycle area, the removal of all personal items from desktops [pictured above] and the use of only brand-approved pens, pencils, highlighters and markers in the workspace.

To make matters awesomer, Martha denounced the Gawker informant on TV, and then wrote in defense of her pen policy on her blog:

I must also inform you that we use a great assortment of writing implements from the Martha Stewart crafts line available at Michael’s Crafts and Walmart.

But what does this mean from a design perspective? What it means, in our considered opinion, is that Martha Stewart is crazy as a soup sandwich.

Lest we be accused of any pro-Gawker bias, however, we would hasten to point out that this evening’s Open Caption post featuring Karl Lagerfeld completely misses the laugh factor of the person appearing with Karl in the photograph. Though Gawker doesn’t seem to know it, the one in leather is none other than Peter Marino, architect, Pin-Up centerfold, and All American Übermensch.

Martha Stewart Surprisingly Anal About New Offices [Gawker]
Martha Stewart Can’t Stop Talking About Our Post on Her Crazy Offices! [Gawker]

A particularly beloved tipster (keep ‘em coming to tips(at)edificial(dot)com!) just sent word of this latest lawsuit to hit our arena, filed by Tony Duquette, Inc., the Hutton Wilkinson (right, with Tony)-run company started by decorator-and-designer Tony Duquette (Deadificial date 9/9/1999), against fashion designer Michael Kors. Seems Kors’ recent resort collection was a bit too inspired by the Duquette brand of jewelry, interiors, and home design. The relationship between architecture and fashion isn’t a new one—the MOCA exhibition Skin + Bones: Parallel Practices in Fashion + Architecture was our world’s equivalent of a Sunday Styles piece on this here internets when it opened in late 2006 while what Zaha’s wearing has been fascinating journalists and students since she was a latter—but a designer suing an architect for breach of intellectual property is something we haven’t trotted around our particular block before.

The lawsuit alleges that Kors knowingly and willfully used the Tony Duquette mark in conjunction with a Kors clothing collection without permission or license. Additionally, the lawsuit alleges Kors used the Abrams book “Tony Duquette,” photographs, images and patterns from the book, and images of Duquette and his long time business associate and co-designer, Hutton Wilkinson, in advertising and promoting the Kors collection. Damages and injunctive relief are sought.

Tony Duquette Files Infringement Suit Against Michael Kors [EINnews]