Eva Hagberg

Rising in the West (Wallpaper)

Published Wallpaper October 2008

Ben van Berkel wants to talk about space-time. At 9am, it seems a little early to be talking time-warp continuums, the potentials of looped narratives, the applicability of the tri-fold diagram. It also seems a little out of context, as we’re in the breakfast lounge of the Gramercy Park Hotel, Ian Schrager’s pre-40 Bond practice run at an extra-louche (“Schnabel was here”) darkly nostalgic Manhattan joint, but when van Berkel’s on a roll, he’s on a roll.

Let’s start at the beginning. Twenty years ago Ben van Berkel and his wife Caroline Bos founded van Berkel + Bos. Van Berkel was the architect and Bos, an art historian and former journalist, was the critic-in-residence, composing everything from essays to project descriptions – roles they continued once their practice transformed into its current incarnation, UN Studio, in 1998.

Van Berkel & Bos was behind the Erasmus Bridge in Rotterdam, a single-pylon engineering marvel, and the Moebius House in Het Gooi, a fluid space inspired by the continuous one-sided Moebius Loop (most often see as the recycling logo). It was this house, completed in 1998, that ignited the architectural duo’s interest in space and time, the idea of folding dimensions and architecturally, and inspired their desire to re-evaluate the way they look at shape.

The same year, van Berkel, unhappy with the way the studio was mono-focused on architecture and its articulation, and inspired by the fact that he wanted to work on many different scales, formed the looser collective of UN Studio. It went on to design everything from bridges and houses to museums and masterplans and even a 55m table, “The World’s Longest Table for all Cultures.” But the collective was in Europe. The old world. And very much part of the Dutch group of architect such as Winka Dubbeldam and West 8 and MVRDV, firms that were as good at engineering pig farms as they were at folding a façade, as interested in books as they were in buildings. Now, UN Studio is breaking free.

Strategy: Getting Booked (Architect)

Published Architect, July 2008 (link)

Some monographs are published as intellectual exercises, to engage the curious would-be architect. Others grace coffee tables and can help while away an empty afternoon. Many aid architects in getting more work. And for all the ways that a reader can look at a monograph, there are just as many ways for an architect to get one published.

So who gets a monograph? Sometimes the path to publication is surprising—and that's exactly the point. Many architects aim for a boutique publisher like Monacelli Press, a New York City imprint that was started 14 years ago in a SoHo basement and currently has offices overlooking Norman Foster's Hearst Tower (in case the staff ever forget about the sweeping power of architecture in their day-to-day bookmaking). Now owned by Random House, Monacelli was the publisher that issued Rem Koolhaas and Bruce Mau's S,M,L,XL , the seminal 1997 monograph that, editorial director Andrea Monfried says, “everyone wants to do the new version of.” That's a tough call, but she points out that what S,M,L,XL's creators did is crucial: They thought holistically about the relation of the book to what it describes.

“There are so many different ways of organizing the book—from the structure to the table of contents—that for every architect, there has to be some relation to the way they practice,” Monfried says. Monacelli's 2000 Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects monograph, named for the fluid relationship the two principals see betweenWork/Life , is a perfect example. “The trick,” Monfried says, “is to get your personality to come through.”

Home McMakin (Wallpaper*)

Published Wallpaper*, August 2008 (full version)

It’s Thursday in Seattle and it’s gray. It’s been gray since Tuesday night, and it will be gray again on Friday. This particular Thursday morning, it’s gray outside but busy inside at William and Ruth True’s house. It’s a typical morning: Ruth steaming milk for her and Bill’s nine-year-old daughter Sophie, Bill checking out an emerging artist’s website, Sophie avoiding her homework. And there are the dogs, Butter and Honey. Butter’s bigger than Honey, a Greater Swiss Mountain Dog where she’s a (of course) honey-colored Labradoodle. The dogs are both excited, jumping around, up and down and over, and Honey jumps up on the sofa and knocks into Sophie, holding the cup of warm steamed milk fresh from Ruth’s gleaming espresso maker, and the milk spills.

It spills onto art.

There’s a lot of art in the True house. There’s a sculpture of a guy crouching down under the stairs, and two photographs by Malerie Marder over the other stairs. There’s a Kiki Smith piece on the side table in the formal living room, and there’s a Brian Jungen on top of the cabinets in the informal kitchen. Even downstairs, in a desolate hallway that leads to the guest bedroom (itself a commissioned work of art), there’s a Claude Zervas and then, even right next to the laundry room, there’s another piece, The Quiet Ticking of Dreams, by New York-based sound artist Ben Rubin of the beloved Listening Post –“We tried to buy it but there was just no way,” Bill True says – project that sat in the basement of the old pre-Piano New York Times building.

Continue reading "Home McMakin (Wallpaper*)" »

The burger at Prune is famous. When Gabrielle Hamilton announced that her downtown Manhattan restaurant, known for simple-done-perfect dishes like sardines on Triscuits and monkfish liver on toast, would serve lunch, the burger was the thing to have. 

There was just one problem when I went to try it. It comes on an English muffin. I don’t like English muffins. There’s something about the dryness of their texture, the almost-metallic dullness of their taste, and the particular way they both soak up and repel moisture that gets right to the heart of my morbid fear of wet bread. So I asked for it on a roll. “No substitutions.” I kicked myself for even asking. 

And then it arrived: a sphere of burger right in the middle of two almost completely flat discs (the photos here are more an artistic interpretation than the real thing, which is impossible to replicate). I didn’t know where to start. Press the ends of the discs together and take the first bite burgerless? Pull the sphere towards the end, which would mean the first bite was full of ground beef and lamb (the not-secret secret) and the last just, ew, soggy bread?

Somehow I got through it. Blissfully, in fact. The English muffin was wet already with butter so the terror of moisture was mitigated by my affection for fat, and the burger flattened out, and then the bacon grabbed onto those little English muffin pockets, and there was just enough room for it on its long wooden platter, and I realized that for all my skepticism, this was a perfectly designed dish. 

Column, Published April 2008

It starts with a misunderstanding and ends with butter. It starts when I meet John, my friend who is a boy, and we’re talking the usual getting-to-know-each-other talk, and I mention that I like cooking a bit, and he mentioned that he likes food, too, and once cooked dinner for 18 people. And so, from this I infer, given my state of absolute unabashed limerence that leads people in these situations down all kinds of inferring roads, that John is a brilliant chef. I do not pay attention to the fact that John doesn’t cook when we’re at his house. Ever. I only pay attention to what I hear, and what I hear is that he is a cook, and a good one at that.

So, for six months, we scramble for dinner. We order in. We go out. Somehow, int hat New York way, we never really focus on what we’re going to eat, or really ever have complete meals. But here and there, we cobble together our survival.

And then I realize that I miss messing around with bowls and spoons, so I start small, with a few things. I tell him I’d like to use his kitchen for some experiments, if he doesn’t mind, and so I start experimenting, but only with things I know how to make, like pancakes. And then, New Year’s Day, I look in his fridge and see that his butter expired. A long time ago. Like, in 2005.

Column, Published March 2008

Three eggs. One cup milk. One cup flour. Two tablespoons sugar. One teaspoon baking powder (optional). That’s it. That – my family’s pancake recipe – has been a mantra since I was old enough to wake up early and get out a bowl, measuring cups, and a wooden spoon. Those five – sometimes four – ingredients were the ones that went together to make our Sunday-morning pancakes (a minor peacekeeping) when I was a (majorly cranky) teenager. Then, when I moved to New York, they were at the center of my friends’ Sunday-morning brunches, my way of plying attention from a six-year-old, my first step towards dinner parties. Those pancakes, the only recipe I cant remember ever not knowing, are the lens through which I can look at my entire biography.

 

Published May 16, 2008 (link)

 

At the very end of last year, the American Institute of Architects awarded Chicago-based architect Stanley Tigerman the Topaz Medallion, which “honors an individual who has made outstanding contributions to architecture education for at least 10 years.” Technically, Tigerman practices with his wife, Margaret McCurry, as Tigerman McCurry Architects , and directs, along with Eva Maddox, his hometown’s Archeworks school, which provides a one-year post-professional education grounded in social causes. Some of his well-known projects include a playfully wonky (some might dare call it postmodernist) Children’s Advocacy Center, and the Pacific Garden Mission, a center for Chicago’s homeless. Practically, Tigerman thinks, disregards, considers, blames, hopes, and criticizes. He is judgmental, thoughtful, optimistic, and politically incorrect. No one is immune: his peers, his friends, his professors, his interviewer. Eva Hagberg takes a walk on his educational wild side. 

Good morning Stanley.
You’re right on time. Actually you’re a little late. 

In 1987 philanthropists Mike and Penny Winton decided that they needed a guesthouse to complement their Philip Johnson-designed home in Orono, Minnesota. In 2007 owner-developer Kirt Woodhouse decided that the University of St. Thomas needed that same guesthouse for its Daniel C. Gainey Conference Center campus in Owatonna, Minnesota. In the 20 years since the Wintons hired an up-and-coming Santa Monica-based architect sho seemed to be onto something with his use of vernacular materials and mishmash approach to buildings, the name Frank Gehry has gone beyond household, and the guesthouse has become more than just a place to sleep.

The Winton Guest House comprises a 2,300-square-foot collection of discrete shapes that form one building (one can see in its separate cohesion a precursor for Mississippi’s Ohr-O’Keefe Museum). It is clad in brick, plywood, and black and galvanized sheet metal—the same types of materials Gehry used on his own Santa Monica home, the design that launched the Frank O. Gehry Associates frenzy.

Published April 16, 2008 (link)

“We like to think of ourselves as the most open-minded clients we’re going to have,” said Greg Bradshaw, principal of the downtown architecture/interiors/fashion/book/concept/ethos/lifestyle/design firm AvroKO, which he heads along with Kristina O’Neal, Adam Farmerie, and a very tired—that evening, at least—William Harris. The four of them were sitting at the end of the bar at PUBLIC, their first venture as their own clients, and were talking about everything from the just-completed transformation of the restaurant Park Avenue Winter into Park Avenue Spring (on which Harris has been working non-stop), to their plans for a new restaurant on the rapidly gentrifying Bowery, to joking about what exactly O’Neal’s SAT scores were, and what exactly they mean.

The four, who met when they were eighteen, each have different approaches, personalities, and skills, but together they make up a coherent and collaborative whole. Initially, however, they operated as two firms, Avro Design (Bradshaw and Farmerie) and KO Media Studios (O’Neal and Harris). After many years of collaborating, the two firms merged while working on PUBLIC. Their ethos is research-driven as much as it is fantastical, interpretive as much as creative, and conceptual as much as style-conscious. The firm has become known mostly for its historically referential restaurant design, clear in everything from the Lower East Side’s Stanton Social, which adopted the neighborhood’s long history of tailoring with a herringbone-riffing wine wall, to PUBLIC—the restaurant they own and above which they work—where they took the discarded fixtures of municipal buildings from the 1930s and recast them, so that an old library card catalog is used to store old menus.

Published April 15, 2008 (link)

David Rockwell is sitting in a rocking chair in the lobby of an Aloft hotel, looking at a pool table. It’s 10 o’clock on a Monday morning in January. More accurately, he’s rocking in the rocking chair, which is green and plastic, and he seems calm for someone who created this theatrical space, whose architecture and design tends toward the bright sweeping gesture, the triple-note move, the overt discussion of play and stage and movement. Every thing looks good: the pool table is in the right place; the LED lights on the bar glow steadily; the entrance’s two glass doors are perfectly spaced; and the hallway carpet (designed to withstand 75,000 double rubs) looks like it’s barely been touched, even though it has, so far, supported hundreds of meetings, visits, inspections, and cocktail parties.

Rockwell is calm because his design for a new hotel chain—with the first location opening this summer in either Beijing, China, or in Lexington, Massachusetts—is looking great. He is happy because he knows that when the first one is finally built, it’ll look pretty much the way it looked in his mind—no small feat for an architect. And he’s in a good mood because the interior is feeling as right as it did the last time he checked in. There’s just one snag.

Blueprint Special (CITY)

The burger at Prune is famous. When Gabrielle Hamilton announced that her downtown Manhattan restaurant, known for simple-done-perfect dishes like sardines on Triscuits and monkfish liver on toast, would serve lunch, the burger was the thing to have. 

There was just one problem when I went to try it. It comes on an English muffin. I don’t like English muffins. There’s something about the dryness of their texture, the almost-metallic dullness of their taste, and the particular way they both soak up and repel moisture that gets right to the heart of my morbid fear of wet bread. So I asked for it on a roll. “No substitutions.” I kicked myself for even asking. 

And then it arrived: a sphere of burger right in the middle of two almost completely flat discs (the photos here are more an artistic interpretation than the real thing, which is impossible to replicate). I didn’t know where to start. Press the ends of the discs together and take the first bite burgerless? Pull the sphere towards the end, which would mean the first bite was full of ground beef and lamb (the not-secret secret) and the last just, ew, soggy bread?

Somehow I got through it. Blissfully, in fact. The English muffin was wet already with butter so the terror of moisture was mitigated by my affection for fat, and the burger flattened out, and then the bacon grabbed onto those little English muffin pockets, and there was just enough room for it on its long wooden platter, and I realized that for all my skepticism, this was a perfectly designed dish. 

Assurance Agent (CITY)

Column, Published April 2008

It starts with a misunderstanding and ends with butter. It starts when I meet John, my friend who is a boy, and we’re talking the usual getting-to-know-each-other talk, and I mention that I like cooking a bit, and he mentioned that he likes food, too, and once cooked dinner for 18 people. And so, from this I infer, given my state of absolute unabashed limerence that leads people in these situations down all kinds of inferring roads, that John is a brilliant chef. I do not pay attention to the fact that John doesn’t cook when we’re at his house. Ever. I only pay attention to what I hear, and what I hear is that he is a cook, and a good one at that.

So, for six months, we scramble for dinner. We order in. We go out. Somehow, int hat New York way, we never really focus on what we’re going to eat, or really ever have complete meals. But here and there, we cobble together our survival.

And then I realize that I miss messing around with bowls and spoons, so I start small, with a few things. I tell him I’d like to use his kitchen for some experiments, if he doesn’t mind, and so I start experimenting, but only with things I know how to make, like pancakes. And then, New Year’s Day, I look in his fridge and see that his butter expired. A long time ago. Like, in 2005.

Flash in the Pan (CITY)

Column, Published March 2008

Three eggs. One cup milk. One cup flour. Two tablespoons sugar. One teaspoon baking powder (optional). That’s it. That – my family’s pancake recipe – has been a mantra since I was old enough to wake up early and get out a bowl, measuring cups, and a wooden spoon. Those five – sometimes four – ingredients were the ones that went together to make our Sunday-morning pancakes (a minor peacekeeping) when I was a (majorly cranky) teenager. Then, when I moved to New York, they were at the center of my friends’ Sunday-morning brunches, my way of plying attention from a six-year-old, my first step towards dinner parties. Those pancakes, the only recipe I cant remember ever not knowing, are the lens through which I can look at my entire biography.

 

Tigerman Sees Red (And Topaz) (Metropolismag.com)

Published May 16, 2008 (link)

 

At the very end of last year, the American Institute of Architects awarded Chicago-based architect Stanley Tigerman the Topaz Medallion, which “honors an individual who has made outstanding contributions to architecture education for at least 10 years.” Technically, Tigerman practices with his wife, Margaret McCurry, as Tigerman McCurry Architects , and directs, along with Eva Maddox, his hometown’s Archeworks school, which provides a one-year post-professional education grounded in social causes. Some of his well-known projects include a playfully wonky (some might dare call it postmodernist) Children’s Advocacy Center, and the Pacific Garden Mission, a center for Chicago’s homeless. Practically, Tigerman thinks, disregards, considers, blames, hopes, and criticizes. He is judgmental, thoughtful, optimistic, and politically incorrect. No one is immune: his peers, his friends, his professors, his interviewer. Eva Hagberg takes a walk on his educational wild side. 

Good morning Stanley.
You’re right on time. Actually you’re a little late. 

Mobile Home? (Metropolis)

In 1987 philanthropists Mike and Penny Winton decided that they needed a guesthouse to complement their Philip Johnson-designed home in Orono, Minnesota. In 2007 owner-developer Kirt Woodhouse decided that the University of St. Thomas needed that same guesthouse for its Daniel C. Gainey Conference Center campus in Owatonna, Minnesota. In the 20 years since the Wintons hired an up-and-coming Santa Monica-based architect sho seemed to be onto something with his use of vernacular materials and mishmash approach to buildings, the name Frank Gehry has gone beyond household, and the guesthouse has become more than just a place to sleep.

The Winton Guest House comprises a 2,300-square-foot collection of discrete shapes that form one building (one can see in its separate cohesion a precursor for Mississippi’s Ohr-O’Keefe Museum). It is clad in brick, plywood, and black and galvanized sheet metal—the same types of materials Gehry used on his own Santa Monica home, the design that launched the Frank O. Gehry Associates frenzy.

The Storytellers (Architect's Newspaper)

Published April 16, 2008 (link)

“We like to think of ourselves as the most open-minded clients we’re going to have,” said Greg Bradshaw, principal of the downtown architecture/interiors/fashion/book/concept/ethos/lifestyle/design firm AvroKO, which he heads along with Kristina O’Neal, Adam Farmerie, and a very tired—that evening, at least—William Harris. The four of them were sitting at the end of the bar at PUBLIC, their first venture as their own clients, and were talking about everything from the just-completed transformation of the restaurant Park Avenue Winter into Park Avenue Spring (on which Harris has been working non-stop), to their plans for a new restaurant on the rapidly gentrifying Bowery, to joking about what exactly O’Neal’s SAT scores were, and what exactly they mean.

The four, who met when they were eighteen, each have different approaches, personalities, and skills, but together they make up a coherent and collaborative whole. Initially, however, they operated as two firms, Avro Design (Bradshaw and Farmerie) and KO Media Studios (O’Neal and Harris). After many years of collaborating, the two firms merged while working on PUBLIC. Their ethos is research-driven as much as it is fantastical, interpretive as much as creative, and conceptual as much as style-conscious. The firm has become known mostly for its historically referential restaurant design, clear in everything from the Lower East Side’s Stanton Social, which adopted the neighborhood’s long history of tailoring with a herringbone-riffing wine wall, to PUBLIC—the restaurant they own and above which they work—where they took the discarded fixtures of municipal buildings from the 1930s and recast them, so that an old library card catalog is used to store old menus.

Behind the Curtains (Metropolis)

Published April 15, 2008 (link)

David Rockwell is sitting in a rocking chair in the lobby of an Aloft hotel, looking at a pool table. It’s 10 o’clock on a Monday morning in January. More accurately, he’s rocking in the rocking chair, which is green and plastic, and he seems calm for someone who created this theatrical space, whose architecture and design tends toward the bright sweeping gesture, the triple-note move, the overt discussion of play and stage and movement. Every thing looks good: the pool table is in the right place; the LED lights on the bar glow steadily; the entrance’s two glass doors are perfectly spaced; and the hallway carpet (designed to withstand 75,000 double rubs) looks like it’s barely been touched, even though it has, so far, supported hundreds of meetings, visits, inspections, and cocktail parties.

Rockwell is calm because his design for a new hotel chain—with the first location opening this summer in either Beijing, China, or in Lexington, Massachusetts—is looking great. He is happy because he knows that when the first one is finally built, it’ll look pretty much the way it looked in his mind—no small feat for an architect. And he’s in a good mood because the interior is feeling as right as it did the last time he checked in. There’s just one snag.