Hasta La Ideas

“This symbol [perfume] is becoming very important for us. I’m working now on projects that are for 2018. The Eau Légère is coming out now. Then there’s men, there’s the bathroom [products]. It’s never-ending. I only like a scent that remains, something that is around forever. I hate that in the world of perfume there is permanently something new coming out–another new bottle or another bright packaging. And I hate when I go to the airport duty-free–now that I’m in that category, I always go through the duty-free–I hate the walls, when all of the packaging is different. I can’t stand it. There are very few people who have a strong vision and strong lineup. All of that takes a lot of thought and consideration. But it’s fascinating, the collaboration…to meet noses and to work with those people. Every time, I always tell our partner Coty Prestige that I have to meet eight to ten noses. It’s interesting always. That’s a fascinating universe.

You know, lots of men like our scent for them. I’m kind of bummed because now Barneys sells the scent of Serge Lutens, the parfums. Before you could only sell the eau de toilette. I distributed it for years in my store, but the parfum you could only buy at the Palais Royal; I liked the idea that you couldn’t get it. That it was very hard. And it eliminated that everybody smells the same.”

–Tomas Maier, creative director of Bottega Veneta, in an interview with Style.com

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“With a plethora of bizarre new architecture engulfing them, baffled Beijingers have devised a new architectural lexicon recalling the wry coinages long perfected by witty Berliners, who, for example, have dubbed the glass dome of Norman Foster’s Reichstag renovation of 1992–1999 die Käseglocke (the cheese cover). Thus the two-legged CCTV colossus has become colloquially known as da kucha (big pants crotch). In trying to preempt a sarcastic nickname of this sort, officials wanted to get locals to refer to the CCTV building as zhi chuan—knowledge window—a pretentious choice that backfired because of its close homophonic echo of zhi chuang—hemorrhoid.

But whatever moniker people adopt, one can predict that they will be beguiled by the highly unusual and equally controlled tourist route that is being built through the CCTV nerve center. Visitors will be able to navigate the premises in one nonstop loop while never disturbing day-to-day activities, a sure-fire public relations coup that will confer a bogus semblance of transparency on what of course is anything but an open operation.”

–Martin Filler, writing in The New York Review of Books on the 4.2-million-square-foot China Central Television Headquarters designed by Rem Koolhaas‘s Office for Metropolitan Architecture

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“I’m from a village where the church comes from the 11th century. As a child, I’d imagine what it must have felt like, a few hundred years earlier, coming to Cologne to see this dome and these stained-glass windows even as everyone for miles around lived in earthen huts. You come into this cathedral and are hit with organ music, incense, colored light, and a skyscraper-tall building—let’s call it architecture or art—but the rest of your existence is lived in a mud shack. Wow. It’s an inspiration. Then years later, civilization built museums so we could go there and find that inspiration.

Today, the thing that inspires artists, and us, are all the images that surround us. So what are those images? It might not be Cologne Cathedral as much anymore because we have lots of skyscrapers, and it might not be paintings because we have YouTube on our phones. So museums have to embrace contemporary practice as something as wide-spanning as a German band like Kraftwerk—along with visual performance, music, synesthesia, and fashion, and all these possible articulations of boundless creativity whenever they reach a certain innovative excellence. Museums have to realize that the influential images that might change our lives are not necessarily paintings, drawings, and sculptures.”

-Director of MoMA PS1 and Chief Curator at Large at the Museum of Modern Art Klaus Biesenbach in the October issue of WSJ. Magazine, which hits newsstands tomorrow in the Wall Street Journal’s weekend paper.

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“Frank Gehry was seventy-five when construction began on his first Manhattan building. Jean Nouvel was fifty-nine. Frank Lloyd Wright was in his eighties. Among the past ten winners of the Pritzker Prize, the profession’s leading international award (and one that [37-year-old Bjarke] Ingels seems impatient to secure), six have not built in the city. Ingels’s New York, and North American, debut will contain nearly nine hundred thousand square feet of apartments and ground-floor commercial space, and is expected to cost half a billion dollars, which—as Ingels pointed out, in a conversation about barriers to early success in architecture—is not outlandish in this context but still exceeds the budget of the most expensive film ever made.

The building, known for the moment as W57, will stand between Fifty-seventh and Fifty-eighth Streets, next to the West Side Highway. It will be unmissable from the river, and should present a dazzling view to drivers approaching from the south. The form of W57 is what you might have if snow drifted steeply into the corner of a yard, and then you removed the yard. Recessed ocean-liner balconies will interrupt the smooth shape, and so will a deep courtyard running from east to west. Its sharp northeastern peak will be forty-one stories high. As we passed the U.S.S. Intrepid, Ingels pointed ahead, ‘It’s a gigantic triangle down to the waterfront!’ he said. ‘It’s going to be the most insane view of anything in New York!’”

–Ian Parker in “High Rise,” a profile of Danish architect Bjarke Ingels that appears in the September 10 issue of The New Yorker

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“The first bride to popularize white wedding dresses was Queen Victoria. She was a tiny, round, plain girl with a nose like a claw hammer and less chin than a terrapin. Charitably, the best thing you could say for her on her wedding day was that she looked like an ornamental toilet-tissue cover. Before Victoria, brides wore what suited them. Red was a popular color; so was black. It’s universally said that all brides look beautiful. Every bride is told repeatedly that she is breathtaking, but white is an unforgiving un-color unless you’re a baby or a corpse. White is particularly bad on pale, pinkish people, but not quite as bad as on sprayed-orange people. The only girls who manage to look decent in wedding dresses are those who look great for a living and would look good in a trash bag or traction. Wedding dresses are a collective blind spot, an aesthetic dead zone. We are brainwashed to believe that a wedding dress is magic, that it has the ability to transform everyone into a raging, shaggable piece of hot, virginal, must-have, never-been-had gorgeousness. But, like all fairy spells, it only works for one day. In any other context, a wedding dress makes you look like a transvestite, which is presumably why the groom isn’t allowed to see it before it’s too late to change his mind.”

–A. A. Gill, in “Can This Wedding Be Saved?” published in the September issue of Vanity Fair

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