Design tools for distraction

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Programming note: I am changing the cadence of this newsletter ever-so-slightly, now that I have turned on paid subscriptions. Archived posts are now behind a paywall, alongside longer-format monthly dispatches. Roundups, news briefs, informal design industry analysis, studio visits, and gift guides will remain free to browse. Today is one of those days, as the only decision with intention you ought to make this week concerns the future of our country.

Curious what’s on the docket for Ground Condition for the remainder of 2024? An architecture itinerary for France, including photography by Laure Joliet. More earth-shattering architecture experiences. Another holiday gift guide (ish). And so much more. As always, thanks for reading and subscribing.

The design exhibition people will be talking about for the next five years

Last week I was lucky enough to get a preview of the latest Cooper Hewitt design triennial, titled “Making Home.” The exhibition—which was organized by curators Alexandra Cunningham Cameron, Christina De León, and Michelle Joan Wilkinson of partner Smithsonian institution NMAAHC—includes 25 site-specific installations that converse with, critique, support, and rebut the idea of “home” in contemporary society. The exhibition design, by LA-based architecture firm Johnston Marklee with graphic identity by Office Ben Ganz, engages the museum’s physical home, the former Carnegie Mansion on New York’s Museum Mile, in ways not typically seen (uncovering the ground floor windows, for one). Carnegie-era interior elements like rugs, drapery, brocades have been replicated in industrial materials “through techniques of scaling, patterning, color saturation and trompe l’oeil.”

Clockwise from top left: detail of After Oceanic Built Environments Lab and Leong Leong’s scalable domestic structure designed after Indigenous Hawaiian architecture. Detail of the reception desk designed by Johnston Marklee with exhibition collateral by Office Ben Ganz. Probably my favorite installation: an extremely minimalist double-sided screen showing a film by Amie Siegel paired with Zuber wallpaper. Another favorite: CFGNY’s obfuscation and sly reveal of the Carnegie Mansion’s Lockwood de Forest library. Friend Jill Singer in the museum’s atrium, which houses a sound experience by Artists in Residence in Everglades (AIRIE). And artist Hugh Hayden’s interpretation (a rocking plinth!) of bass-baritone singer Davóne Tines’s “elusive relationship with home as an attempt to regain balance and stability.”

Anyone who lives in New York (or can make it there before August 10 of next year) should go witness the triennial in action for themselves. The Cooper Hewitt, being part of the Smithsonian and one of few design-dedicated museum institutions in the US, is uniquely positioned to deliver the gospel of design through a multidisciplinary approach, vis-a-vis its collections and its public remit. The curators’ approach for this triennial is effective, and I would imagine not easily accomplished: The trio has opened the aperture of institutional perspective; collaborated with a deep bench of intelligent, widely varied design practitioners; then presented the experience in an accessible format that engages all senses, thus engaging the wider public.

Ronald Rael’s installation of “Casa Desenterrada,” which displays adobe bricks that Rael exhumed and reconstituted from the demolished Ute Indian Agency site in southern Colorado. Photo: Elliot Goldstein © Smithsonian Institution. Rael is also a professor at UC Berkeley’s College of Environmental Design, a place near and dear to my heart.

I am only linking the digital exhibition as a prelude to the real thing. Haul yourself to 91st Street ASAP and thank me later!

Odds and ends

• Reconsidering a personal “daylight only” lighting rule after reading Fred Nicolaus’s dive into interior nighttime photography for Business of Home coupled with FOR_SCALE’s homage to the canon here:

LOUDLY INTO "THE NIGHT"

• On that note, New York’s exquisite Jacqueline Sullivan Gallery is opening a new group show next week titled ‘In Praise of Shadows.’

• Some great architecture to track via Instagram: Michael Chen of MKCA is starting work on a brutalist ruin in the south of France and you have to see this thing. I’m screaming just thinking about it.

• Speaking of houses that inspire mania, George Homsey’s own house is for sale, off-market, in San Francisco. Homsey worked with Joseph Esherick on a bunch of Sea Ranch houses and it shows. This one is divine; plus, a connected house owned by Homsey’s friend and collaborator is also up for sale—same massing and a similar plan, but ready for a complete renovation. If you buy either, you are obligated to invite me over.

• Cola Studios is a residential interior design duo based in New York whose founders, Olya Dmitrieva and Sam Colamussi, started a Substack that is fully stocked with leads on where to shop for and how to collect design. (FT, are you listening?)

Desire paths*

One thread left hanging from the last issue of Ground Condition—in which I quizzed design people on architecture that has imprinted itself on their memories—is around desire. Friend and thinker Asad Syrkett noted how an architectural folly is human desire made manifest. Which got me thinking of spaces designed to evoke desire and satisfy a highly idiosyncratic notion of pleasure. (Architect Paul Rudolph’s penchant for carpeted interior landscapes comes to mind. Rudolph’s late projects, primarily focused on private residences, “had a markedly more sensual and at times dangerous quality to them,” according to Rudolph scholar Timothy Rohan. Basically the definition of desire!)

Left: The Elman apartment by Paul Rudolph (1971) that no longer exists but lives in my head. Right: Rudolph’s bedroom at 23 Beekman Place, which, in academic language, “was no doubt conceived as a setting for sex.” No doubt! (Rohan, The Architecture of Paul Rudolph, page 187.)

Which is not to say that the architecture of desire has to entail something explicitly sexy. What if we were to prize experience over objects, and spend our time seeking feeling through experience? I use the word “experience” broadly: experience could be making something, it could mean seeking out local architecture spots, it could mean spending QT with nature. And it is through tangible, haptic experience that desire builds.

So much of “desire” in our current culture is translated through consumer impulses—a capitalism-enabled cycle of wanting newness and acquiring possessions. And the thing is! I think we all know this. (There is certainly no shortage of writers who cover consumer culture.) It is precisely why feeling a building happens at all—it is so outside of our daily rhythm, our need to be seen, our need to acquire. This question on whether objects make the man, so to speak, has been an obsession since the dawning of the bourgeoisie. A bit of a tangent, but consider this quotation from an old New York magazine story on the 90s-era literature movement New Narrative. The author is referring specifically to writers who “softened [the style's] bluntness to reveal a blight on the middle-class soul.”

The message seemed to be that you could wear Prada, but you did so with the knowledge that its price wasn’t just measured in dollars.

I know how it is. Modern life is distracting. Focus is hard. (If you’ve gotten this far and are still reading words, honestly, kudos to you.) Things, objects, handmade clothes, Prada—all can be beautiful vehicles for pleasure. But I do think there’s something lost when life seems too chaotic to observe, to interrogate, to consider, and more than anything, seek desire through experience.

Until next time,
Kelsey

*All about desire paths, for the uninitiated.

Photo by Christene Barberich, taken at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum.