Quote of Note | Paola Antonelli

“[Since becoming a curator in 1994, my view of design has] definitely moved more towards the ‘five-dimensional.’ The common thread is always how people live and what design can do to make life better. If design has more to say in the immaterial realm then I focus on that. I can’t deny that furniture excites me less and less. I still get excited by some pieces, like Dirk Vander Kooij‘s ‘Endless Flow’ rocking chair of 2011 (pictured). There needs to be innovation in the process and in the material because otherwise how many more chairs do we need? You need to justify your use of physical resources and your occupation of space with real innovation, real talent, and even fantasy and delight. I’m not so much of a moralist to think everything needs a purpose.”

Paola Antonelli, director of research and development and senior curator of architecture and design at MoMA, in an interview with Ermanno Rivetti that appears in this month’s issue of The Art Newspaper

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Quote of Note | Terry Jones


A photograph by Terry Jones taken at the Comme des Garçons showroom.

“My creative inspiration [for putting together these books] was seeing how [my wife] Tricia arranged her wardrobe. Fashion is not about the latest item you’ve bought–it’s an evolution of personal style. Today’s wardrobe is most inspirational when it has a history…

Selecting from the pages of i-D and sometimes making repro-facsimiles of the fashion pages to reflect the graphics of the time, together with transcripts of conversations or interviews with designers, then adding footnotes and facts, gave me opportunity to add a depth of hidden information. I avoided putting the book in chronological order–I prefer the moment being right, and these books are portfolios of moments in time, much like how the brain works. We have included images that I’ve found in i-D‘s archive or been given permission by the designer or some of our photographic contributors. We have also included video stills taken from screen grabs from my personal footage, as I love the blur of fashion.”

Terry Jones, founder and creative director of i-D magazine, on his new Taschen series on contemporary fashion designers. The first three monographs–on Rei Kawakubo, Vivienne Westwood, and Yohji Yamamoto–will most likely be followed by books on Raf Simons and Rick Owens, according to Jones.

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Quote of Note | Mary Katrantzou


Looks from the fall 2013 Mary Katrantzou collection, shown Sunday in London.

“All my prints are constructed through digital technology. Studying architecture made me very aware of the digital construction and technicality of engineering in design, which has really informed my design direction with prints. In my design and thought process, I’m constantly building from the foundations of my initial inspiration, and I often use architectural methods of accumulating designs at phase one. Engineering my prints is very mathematical and technical, and it allows me to envision a 3D shape around the body, sculpting a second skin for a woman. Digital print allows me to experiment with print in a way that fine art and other methods could not. It opens up a huge spectrum for possibility. I can create possibility out of impossibility, surrealism out of realism and vice versa for both.”

-Fashion designer Mary Katrantzou (who studied architecture at RISD before transferring to Central Saint Martins) in an interview with Nordstrom’s Qianna Smith

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Quote of Note | Deyan Sudjic

Ettore Sottsass’s Valentine typewriter, designed in 1969, was made in tens of thousands at the Olivetti factory in Barcelona. What makes it fascinating is that it was the first time a company that specialized in making office equipment tried to turn the kind of machine that signalled work into something that looked playful. Or, as Sottsass put it, the kind of thing that might keep poets company on lonely Sundays in the country.

Sottsass made the Valentine bright red and used moulded plastic for the shell. The two ribbon spools were bright orange. According to Perry King, Sottsass’s British assistant on the project, the spools were meant to suggest the flashing of a pair of nipples. Less sexist, the carrying case was designed to be as stylish as the machine itself and could, at a push, be turned into a makeshift stool. But the marketing department at Olivetti vetoed Sottsass’s other idea: that it should only have upper case letters so as to simplify the mechanism and lower the price. The company saw itself as radical but not that radical.”

Deyan Sudjic, director of London’s Design Museum, in the Financial Times

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Quote of Note | Tyler Brûlé

“I wouldn’t be caught dead wearing the color purple. That’s the cardinal rule….Purple is a color compromise. You could do a presentation to a group of executives for a new brand, and you could go the very forceful hot, glossy red route and then you could maybe show them the more matte, conservative deep navy route. Weak agencies or a weak chairman will then just end up with a mélange of the two, and you get purple, a color of compromise.”

Monocle editor-in-chief and Financial Times columnist Tyler Brûlé in an interview with The New York Times Magazine

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Quote of Note | Guy Trebay

“I read the sports section very, very avidly. It’s one of the few places left where you find human interest. It’s very narrative, not to say novelistic, to follow sports teams and sports in play. Fashion is a bit like that, because the personnel set is not that changeable. It’s one of the weirdest and most contradictory things about fashion. It’s based on novelty, but in many ways very little is new. It’s such a stable population. All the editors have been the same forever. All the designers have been more or less the same forever. The only thing that changed was when Anna Wintour saw that nobody was developing a farm team, and got in gear. Because everybody was aging out and there was nobody to replace them. Because she’s a great HR person, she literally made it her business to make another generation to cultivate and anoint.”

Guy Trebay of The New York Times, interviewed by Jay Ruttenberg in Fashion Projects

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Quote of Note | Robert A.M. Stern

“When I was a young architect, I never took a camera traveling because I thought I would look like a tourist. Then I had a realization: I was a tourist. So I began by taking slides, and for the past decade or so, digital photos. When I look at buildings, I take as many photos as possible–it actually helps me to see. Back at the office, they’re organized in a system that makes it possible to call the images up at any given moment. When we start a new project, we always begin by looking at ‘Bob’s favorites.’”

Robert A.M. Stern in Architectural Digest

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Quote of Note | James Gleick

“…[T]he Library of Congress is now stockpiling the entire Twitterverse, or Tweetosphere, or whatever we’ll end up calling it—anyway, the corpus of all public tweets. There are a lot. The library embarked on this project in April 2010, when Jack Dorsey’s microblogging service was four years old, and four years of tweeting had produced 21 billion messages. Since then Twitter has grown, as these things do, and 21 billion tweets represents not much more than a month’s worth. As of December [2012], the library had received 170 billion—each one a 140-character capsule garbed in metadata with the who-when-where.

The library has attached itself to the firehose. A stream of information flows from 500 million registered twitterers (counting duplicates, dead people, parodies, imaginary friends, and bots) who thumb their hurried epistles into phones and tablets and PCs, and the tweets pour into Twitter’s servers at a rate of thousands per second—tens of thousands at peak times: World Cup matches, presidential elections, Beyonce’s pregnancy—and make their way in ‘real time’ to a company called Gnip, a social-media data provider in Boulder, Colorado. Gnip organizes them into one-hour batches on a secure server for download, where they are counted and checked and finally copied to reels of magnetic tape, to be stored in a couple of filing cabinets. In different locations, for safety. If you have ever tweeted, rest assured that each of your little gems is there for posterity.”

James Gleick considers “Librarians of the Twitterverse” on NYRBlog

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Quote of Note | Andrée Putman

“Having to do a hotel where I was given an almost incomprehensible [very tight] budget, so ridiculous, led me to black and white. I had to use the lowest priced tile in the United States. At first they brought me little pink tiles for the bathrooms. My voice trembling with despair, I asked if they came in white…They said yes! Suddenly I realized, that’s going to be horribly dull!…And in black? Yes…A-ha! We’ll do the bathrooms in black and white. A sort of potluck, with a nice metal washbasin and a few good lights…Suddenly, we had a really nice bathroom. The black and white label comes from there.”

-Interior designer Andrée Putman, who died Saturday in Paris at the age of 87

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Quote of Note | OK Go’s Tim Nordwind on 2013

“I want this year to be the year of the DIY gadget maker. People who have really good ideas should be able to find a way to fund them through Kickstarter and other sites. OK Go’s style is very DIY. We make our own videos; we make our own records. In the beginning, our videos were made for next to nothing, but we were able to put them out there and anyone with a computer and access to the Internet could watch them. I like that style of making–just having a good idea and letting people decide whether they like or not.”

Tim Nordwind, bassist for OK Go and Pyramids, in Saturday’s Wall Street Journal

OK Go’s most recent video, “Needing/Getting”:

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