You Have Arrived--Flight 506

Terminal 6: The Sundrome (Pei, Cobb, Freed & Partners, 1971)

Sundrome is another fairly cool name for a terminal, although I'll admit I don't know exactly what it means. It was a project begun by the Port Authority in 1959 to house a number of different airlines. When it was finally completed over a decade later, it became the home of National Airlines. The latest tenant, of course, was jetBlue, but they've since abandoned the Sundrome for T5.


--All JFK photos ©2010, Ryan Witte, unless otherwise noted.
The building was the result of a competition. Wallace Harrison was on the jury, as was Pietro Belluschi, who coincidentally assisted Gropius on the Pan Am Building. Another of the competition entries was by Philip Johnson, the drawings for which I would love to see, if I knew where or how to find them. The winning entry ultimately came from the office of I. M. Pei. Luckily, his John Hancock Tower hadn't started raining broken glass onto the streets of Boston, or Pei might have been more cautious in his use of glass. For the Sundrome, he employed the first use in America of glass mullions between the windows. They give the building brilliant structural and visual clarity. It was evidently a huge influence on airport architecture all over the world.


As Pei explained, since there are no metal mullions, it's very clear that it's the columns supporting the building. There's also nothing to disrupt the total transparency of the facade. The Sundrome's vaguely classical sensibility finds intriguing counterpoint in entirely modern materials and construction methods.


On my first trip out, I had the displeasure of seeing the inside of this building in a shameful state of decrepitude. The thing that struck me most was the sickly color of the windows, which I attributed to decades of cigarette smoke. It was later pointed out to me that the sunlight would stream so blindingly through the windows in the afternoon hours that employees were forced to wear sunglasses. The windows had to be tinted. I think the point remains, however, that if my first guess was a coat of tobacco tar, there's something very wrong there.


We've recently learned that the Port Authority has authorized this building's demolition. I, for one, am appalled. It's a stunningly sleek structure by one of our greatest and most celebrated architects. Something must be done to save this building. I myself wrote a heartfelt op-ed piece that I sent to the New York Times, riding the tail of controversy over NYU's interventions at Pei's Silver Towers. They chose to ignore it.


--Photo courtesy E-Architect.
I think it would be a great travesty if it were allowed to be destroyed. The friend of mine with whom I visited JFK the first time and who knows the airport quite well remarked also that due to its size and layout, it would lend itself far better to expansion than some of the other terminals that are not at risk.

The Port Authority wants to tear this down. NYU wants to mess with the Silver Towers site. The Third Church of Christ, Scientist in DC fought long and hard to be rid of their Pei. I just don't get it. It's not like we're talking about Paul Rudolph here. Not that I wouldn't be just as disgusted if it were Rudolph, I just wouldn't be quite so surprised. Almost everything Rudolph has still standing is controversial in some way or another. He's an acquired taste.

Has no one ever even seen the National Gallery of Art building? It's an astonishingly beautiful structure. A coworker of mine recently saw the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston in person (sadly, I never have) and had a similar epiphany about that one (luckily the intervention there, by Rafael Viñoly, is receiving well-deserved accolades). This is the man entrusted with new construction at the Louvre, for crying out loud. I don't know that whole saga, but I can't imagine a project more likely to have to pass through a labyrinthine mire of hopelessly conservative committees and panels and bureaucracy. My point is, I find it difficult to believe that we're even having this conversation about I. M. Pei in the first place. What is the world coming to?

The final chapter.

©2010, Ryan Witte

Pink Abstraction

Once again, I'm seeing way more things lately than I have time to write about. One of the shows was Georgia O'Keeffe--Abstraction at my favorite museum, the Whitney. There can hardly be any doubt the Whitney was at least in part prompted to mount this show by the recent film with Joan Allen in the role of the artist.

Alfred Stieglitz, Georgia O'Keeffe (1918, gelatin silver print)

--Image courtesy The Artist's Magazine.

There was a lot of discussion about her relationship with Alfred Stieglitz. He championed her work in his gallery, and when she moved to New York, they quickly fell in love and became this sort of crazy Power Couple in the art scene. They kind of remind me of Matthew Barney and Björk. The press would eat up everything they did, basically. He took a series of nude photographs of her, many of which are on display in a dedicated museum gallery. The photographs cemented her image in the public consciousness, but also gave her a reputation, true or not, of being this kind of free-wheeling, free-thinking, Bohemian modern woman.

It's kind of a shame how fantastic and important an artist Georgia O'Keeffe is, because she's become so stigmatized for me. It's the little old ladies. I said to my friend who works there, "the little old ladies just looove O'Keeffe, don't they?" He was like, "yeah, that's all we've been getting lately."

When I showed up, I was lucky to find a gallery tour just beginning, so I started to listen. This docent was so fantastic that I followed her for her entire talk, which I almost never do. A lot of other people thought so, too; there were about thirty or thirty-five little old ladies who stayed with the docent and...one other guy and myself. Then there's this third guy, maybe in his early forties, who was like 225 pounds of muscle and made for a kind of amusing contrast. It was an olfactory experience, too, since each little old lady was surrounded a heavy cloud of some different sickly sweet, flowery perfume, and one of them was--audibly--passing gas. I find it so bizarre that the little old ladies worship O'Keeffe so readily since the woman was, essentially, painting her private parts.

Georgia O'Keeffe, Blue Line (1919, oil on canvas)

--Image courtesy The Art Database.

This one is probably not safe for work or for underaged readers: Alfred Stieglitz, Georgia O'Keeffe (1922, gelatin silver print). I absolutely love the irony of how difficult this image is to find. As practically impossible as it is to avoid seeing pornography on the internet at least twelve times a day, this photograph, which is indubitably a work of art, is sorely hidden behind pages and pages of Googling.

It's true that she was one of the only influential female artists to be recognized as such during her lifetime, which is empowering and must have been a great deal more so for women of the generation who grew up in the 1940s. If you're not paying attention, she's just painting nature, and with extraordinary use of color. Her work is without question pretty. In that sense, her work is very "safe" by today's standards, especially compared to someone like Damien Hirst, showing us the insides of animals. But I just thought it was fairly obvious to everyone that she was painting female genitalia. Doesn't that kind of stuff make little old ladies uncomfortable? I don't get it.

Although women are legally permitted to go topless anywhere that men are, and this is also clearly a work of art, I'd prefer to keep things clean on here: Alfred Stieglitz, Georgia O'Keeffe--Breasts (1919, gelatin silver print). Unfortunately, the work in the show that most alludes to this, Alligator Pears (1923, oil on board), is from a private collection and impossible to find online.

By the way, the museums are once again in sync with one another in this regard. The sexual subtext of the Vermeer exhibit has obvious parallels. Wassily Kandinsky's work went through an exploration of abstraction very similar to that of O'Keeffe at various points in her career. Perhaps I'm being unconsciously indoctrinated, myself. Her depictions of skulls (none of which are in this show) can't help but remind me of Sylvie Rosenthal, and some of her later work very much reminded me of Daniel Zeller's:

Black Place I (1944, oil on canvas)

--Image courtesy The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

In any case, I had the added challenge of setting aside my feelings about O'Keeffe's stigma in order to appreciate her work as fully as it deserves. I think I was fairly successful, despite my company in the galleries. I'd seen many of these pieces before, of course, but there's nothing like a full retrospective to clarify what an artist truly accomplished. As usual, the Whitney has done a fantastic job.

The first couple of galleries are devoted to her early studies in watercolor, where you can see how she was beginning to experiment with abstraction and develop the visual elements that would recur time and again throughout her career. Although extremely illustrative, I wasn't as impressed with the watercolors and early oils, so I'd like to begin a little further along.

Dark Abstraction (1924, oil on canvas). The docent kind of joked about the titles O'Keeffe gave her paintings, which said so very little about what the work was. This is a great example.

--This and following three images courtesy SoHo Art.

I'll have to say that I like these darker works far better than the lighter, pastel ones. They just feel so much more legitimate to me. There is always an element of Beauty in all works of art, even those that might be considered ugly. Ugly works of art in their own way question our perceptions and concepts of Beauty, by rejecting it. Ironically, I feel as if I trust the intentions of artworks more if they aren't trying to be "pretty." I also heard it said recently that, once it was commandeered and widely disseminated by industrial production around the beginning of the twentieth century, Beauty became no longer the province of Art.

That's the problem I think I have with her use of color: it's too pretty. In a way, I feel that it isn't challenging me as the viewer and feels cheap and too easy. For instance, I think it'd be fairly easy to see the problems with an evaluation of the historical significance of someone like Robert Mapplethorpe based solely on his floral still-lifes, considering how very shocking and disturbing his other work was. That's not to say Dark Abstraction is ugly in the slightest, quite the contrary. But with these works, she feels more like a real artist to me. Maybe that's pretentious of me.

Corn Dark (1924, oil on composition board)

I also consider her abstract work infinitely more interesting than her representational pieces. Perhaps that's another reason her work often felt little-old-ladylike to me and why I found this show so fantastic. When she got into the skulls and the imagery of the American West, there was the element of something dark--macabre I think is a little too strong a word--to balance out her style. With the flowers, rendered very realistically, it becomes a bit too prissy for me. Not that I can't find beauty in nature, of course, but that's exactly the point. To merely recreate that beauty on the canvas, it's little more than a pale copy. With her more abstract pieces, her artistry becomes tantamount. Here it's the work of art that's beautiful, in and of itself, not the subject being represented. Certainly her artistry comes through in all her different styles. But with the representational work, it's too muddled and obscured by the subject. With her abstract work, the painterly affects she achieved with line and color become much more prominent, and I think it makes the work in this show far more historically poignant.

Red and Pink (1925, oil on canvas)

This was one of the more interesting pieces on view. It's somewhat small, and it's actually one of a series of illustrations for a fabric manufacturer's advertising campaign. O'Keeffe here wasn't painting flowers, but a sheet of fabric with a floral pattern on it.

Pink Tulip (1925, oil on canvas)

This is exactly what I mean. The overwhelming pinkness and the frilly contours of the flower are just a bit too much for me to handle. I can't help but fear it's sexist of me to say such a thing, or at least bordering on it. But perhaps my embarrassing reaction to this painting is precisely the point. The art world was completely overrun by a whole lot of men, none of whom would have or could have painted this painting in a million years. It required a woman's voice for this type of imagery to come into existence. And while she was without question innovative in many ways that later (male) artists would emulate, she was also distinctive in ways they couldn't. She was going down a road where they couldn't follow.

Line and Curve (1927, oil on canvas)

--Image courtesy Happy Shadows.

Another one from this period, Abstraction White (1927, oil on canvas), was unfortunately impossible to find. I can imagine few more obvious precursors to Minimalism than these pieces, and this is nearly forty years earlier. I also really appreciate her work in black and white, because it offers an opportunity to ignore color for the moment and better discern what she was doing with line and field.

Abstraction Blue (1927, oil on canvas)

--Image courtesy Museum of Modern Art.

It's the way lines emerge, converge, diverge, and disappear again. Lines are always appearing out of fields, gradually changing their color or intensity, and threatening to dissolve back into complex fields of color. For O'Keeffe, lines don't just demarcate fields, they become part of the essence, the very body of the fields.

Jack-in-the-Pulpit--No. 3, No. IV, No. 5, and No. VI (all 1930, oil on canvas)

--Images courtesy Peter R., A Thing of Beauty, Huffington Post, and This New England, respectively.

This was really one of the best things about this show. It's a series of paintings of one type of flower, a Jack-in-the-Pulpit (hence the titles), which shows with incredible clarity the process the artist went through in abstracting her subjects.

--Photo courtesy William Tanneberger.

With one simple series, it's as if she's training the viewer's eye to see in a very specific and peculiar way. Seldom has this been possible with any other artist outside of a retrospective of their work, after the fact. These were executed inside a single year.

Green Grey Abstraction (1931, oil on canvas)

--Image courtesy Art in Transit.

She and Stieglitz spent a lot of time apart because she loved to travel and he refused to leave New York City. Upon her return from one retreat, she discovered Stieglitz was having an affair. It devastated her. This dark, somber work is actually a portrait of Stieglitz. The fascinating thing this show illuminates, by focusing on her abstract work, is that she did virtually none of it for this entire decade. Abstraction was very hard on O'Keeffe; it took a lot out of her. It required her to bring to the surface and make manifest something very deep and personal inside her. Representational works were an escape, and in her depression, she found solace in them.

After this period, she began to realize that she could once again start to explore some of the principles of abstraction, but remain true to her interest in landscape and the natural world. This was the period that gave rise to works like Black Place I, above. They are representational, but frame the real world in an abstract manner. From there she continued in this direction, becoming more and more primary. Eventually, by the 1950s, she gets to a place that the Minimalists of a decade later should've been ashamed to not have acknowledged more vocally.

My Last Door (1954, oil on canvas)

--Image courtesy The Art Browser.

Black Door with Red (1954, oil on canvas)

--Image courtesy Antiques and the Arts.

They actually depicted her house and yard. These pieces so obviously prefigure the work of artists in the 1960s, it's quite astonishing. Not long after this, she started going blind. The docent pointed out that there could be no fate more cruel for a painter than this. Beethoven allegedly contemplated suicide. When her eyesight began to fade in the 1970s, she returned to simple watercolors which were easier for her eyes to handle. She lived another ten years, and in 1986, we lost one of the most important artists of the twentieth century.

You have until January 17th to catch the Whitney's show. I must highly recommend it, whether you're a little old lady or not.

[EDIT: To all the porn-seekers who arrived here looking for Georgia's boobs, I hope you learned something.]

©2009, Ryan Witte

Top Convertibles

I've said before that I am kind of steering away from stark Modernism in recent years. But I do think it still has its place at times. Here and there I do find people doing great work in this vein, one of them is Germany's Kati Meyer-Brühl. First, here's "Sunrise":

Click images for larger.

It's a bit hard-edged for my taste, personally, but surrounded by different kinds of pieces, it could work very nicely. Shown in some much brighter colors, it was a bit too much for me, but I really like it in the beige shown here. I think upholstery is very important with these kinds of pieces, which I've explained elsewhere.

"Lucky" is a very interesting line of seating, as well, pleasingly simple but with interesting textural qualities:

She's clothed this frame with a number of different upholstery treatments:

If you click that last one, you can see it's adorned with large upholstered flowers. I really love this idea in theory. Unfortunately, in execution, I think it becomes too overly feminine for all but somewhat limited situations. If done in a dark brown library red leather or paired with, say, a really thick, heavy, dark wooden coffee table, I definitely think it could work. But I think it'd have to be used carefully.

I think my favorite piece is "Mosspink," modern and sparse but playful and interesting at the same time:

The curvaceous asymmetry and the different colors give a welcoming, informal sensibility to an otherwise clearly modern piece. It works beautifully, but it has the same appeal even in a single color:

For anyone who happens to be looking for a sofabed and is consistently disturbed by the mostly awful selections there are to choose from, I definitely recommend checking out Brühl's convertible pieces. They're extremely suave and clearly a cut above the norm. Her "Roro" line is especially well done:

There are a number of different sectional pieces to choose, but most impressive is the way a single piece can be changed to provide so many different configurations.

We live in an era of flexible, adaptable spaces and are steering away from the single-use rooms of the homes of the twentieth century. It's surprising to me that there aren't more people doing things like this.

©2009, Ryan Witte

A Vote Against Scary Post-Halloween Lectures

Monday night I went to hear a lecture at the Dia Art Center.  Yes, their Chelsea location is closed, but this lecture series is sort of keeping them on the map until they're back up and running.  It was Tom Burr discussing Robert Ryman.

It was HORRIBLE.  If you ever notice Burr's name associated with a talk, turn around and flee.  He's one of the worst public speakers I have ever heard.  I speak to groups of perfect strangers day in and day out, conveying information and facts and figures and theories and anecdotes, objectively and subjectively, and I'm compelled to make it as entertaining as I can.  It's not always easy.  But these people wanted to be there.  They were very interested in either Burr or Ryman or both.  They'd made the trip to Eleventh Avenue of their own volition, they'd paid to be there.  I often have teenagers to contend with who are about a fraction of a second away from rolling their eyes OH so deeply back into their skulls in irritation or giving a looooong sigh of utter boredom after my every sentence.  I have absolutely no sympathy for Tom Burr.

He said from the very beginning it wouldn't be a conversation, he'd just be reading, and there would be no images; what you see is what you get.  The first proposition was a mistake because he's also a terrible writer.  Maybe if he'd just spoken to the audience it would have been sufferable, or at least had a tiny bit of personality to it.  He also made no eye contact with the audience for more than a split second and only maybe twice.  He stumbled over a word or phrase in practically every sentence out of his mouth.  To the second proposition you can say "well, Ryman is a Minimalist (the artist didn't like that term, himself, but there it is) so the work would look ridiculous in a slide show (very true), and because of the nature of his work, it's very apropos to hold the lecture against a stark white wall of this meeting room."  I don't buy it.  

First of all, it's just downright lazy.  Presumably, if Dia asks you to give a lecture for them, you'd have free reign to walk all around Dia Beacon and get your own images to illustrate what you're talking about, or even rummage through their image collection.  I would KILL for that opportunity.  Secondly, he wasn't just talking about Ryman, but also brought up Whistler and Annie Leibowitz and other artists.  I am a HUGE fan of Whistler, but his reasoning behind bringing him into the conversation at all was flimsy at best.  Lastly, let's say you stand firm on the decision to not include any images in your presentation on stylistic grounds, to give him the benefit of the doubt.  In that case, what comes out of your mouth had better be the most detailed, colorful, picturesque, enhanced descriptions of the visual pieces you're referring to.  His were hazy, vague, and entirely unhelpful. 

So all we have is this figure in all black against a huge stark white wall; when I lost the ability to keep my eyes in focus I thought it would put me in a trance.  And he launches into not only "reading voice," but with the drawling monotone inflection of an expert hypnotist.  His first self-serving gesture, which didn't strike me as such so close to the beginning of his ramble, was to recite one of his own poems.  Again, not entirely clear why it was even relevant, and not a particularly good poem, either.  It was perhaps like one of the better offerings in a high school English class anthology of student work, printed in an edition of 30.

In his defense, he did stumble onto at least one interesting observation toward the beginning.  It's that because so much of Ryman's work deals with pure textures and/or its bodily connection to the gallery space, it often operates like "paintings that are trying to be sculptures, or sculptures with a painterly affectation."  But he never elaborated on that.

I will.  Minimalism--as an abstract concept, not a grouping of specific artworks--is probably my favorite period.  I see it as the singular end point, like the head of a needle, toward which everything that had happened in Art History since the Renaissance had been directed.  By a gradual process of reduction, bit by bit, reevaluating and removing what the requisites were for something to be "art," it all leads here.  I've encountered a lot of arguments for having this belief, but I hold onto it.  It's the end point, where painting returns to its very primary, paleolithic origin, and beyond which one can go no further.  And it didn't.  At this moment, the art object begins to dissolve, and we're ushered--shoved even--into a new era, Conceptual Art.

Ryman's work, especially, rests very, very close to the tip of that needle.  It was Painting.  Just that.  Period.  It's about the application of a medium.  Primary.  The first idea that came to some brilliant cave-dwelling human 35,000 years ago, divorced from the goal to proudly record that day's buffalo hunt, first he or she had to have that idea: apply a medium to a surface.

As much as I love the alpha/omega this represents in the continuum of painting, and as fascinating an observation Burr made about the work's sculptural qualities, I run into a problem.  I encountered it also with Ad Reinhardt.  It's the great irony of this moment, and why I consider it so transcendentally important: the closer and closer one gets to the very purest, basic nature of Painting--paint on canvas, nothing more--is exactly when it begins to transform into something else, altogether, and is no longer actually Painting anymore.  What it does transform into would depend on the piece: performance art, sculpture, textile design, engineering, it doesn't matter.  The true essence of the art of painting is therefore mysteriously elusive.  As soon as you try to grasp onto it, it disappears like a ghost.  As far as I'm concerned, Ryman is standing precariously right on that threshold.

Getting back to the lecture, and speaking of high school English class, you know how a fourth grader asked to write a daunting 300 word paper will employ all kinds of strategies to build up the word count?  Like copying entire dictionary entries verbatim, repeating the exact same statement in five slightly different sentences?  Yeah, I'm not sure he included either of those examples, but that was how it came off.  His favorite one was lists.  List after list after list.

The whole paper was completely disorganized and incoherent.  He drawls on and on for a while about how when he's in a gallery space he fears his body might get attached to the wall like a prosthesis or something.  What?  Utterly irrelevant, why do we need to know that?  What does it have to do with Robert Ryman?  And above all, who cares?  Obviously, I have not the slightest problem with including subjective impressions or personal reflections into theoretical prose, I do it here all the time.  But this is just self-serving nonsense, masturbation, if you'll forgive that analogy.

Then he switches to talking about make-up, and possibly there's some useful connection, but he doesn't really figure out what it is well enough to elucidate.  List of Estée Lauder foundation colors.  List of Benjamin Moore (or whatever) whites and off-whites.  Each. one. listed. seperately. with. a. period. after. it.  I think that was when I slipped into a coma for a few moments.

When I came back around, he had switched to talking about how a Ryman painting would operate in a residential setting rather than a museum or gallery space, an interesting question if it had gone anywhere.  Instead Burr launches into a long, complete, drawn out, nondescript inventory of ALL the things he has in his living room.  No, really, I'm serious.  I got up and left.

It was entirely rude of me, it wasn't a big room or darkened or a very large audience to mask the departure of one person.  I was in the back and didn't make a scene out of it, though.  I just quietly got up and tiptoed out.  I would have left even sooner, but I wanted to be able to post about the entire lecture.  I just couldn't take it anymore.  I could tell by body language in the audience and the almost continuous string of coughs and throat clearings that the feeling was pretty much universal.  On my way out, the guy who'd checked me in gave me a goodbye smile and I smiled back.  I could be wrong, but I think his smile seemed to say "yeah, it's pretty bad, isn't it?"

I'm certainly not going to discount Dia's entire lecture series based on this one, but I will make sure it's a topic that really fascinates me before I'll be willing to make the trip down there again.  They damn well should never ask Tom Burr back to torture audiences again.  I didn't see any on their calendar that grabbed my attention the way this one had.  The real crime is that I do adore Ryman's work.  If that enthusiasm couldn't rescue this atrocious lecture, nothing was going to.

©2008, Ryan Witte

The Natives Are Restless

This is sort of like two posts in one, but The Eastique Company is in Dix Hills, out on Long Island. They're doing some of the most wonderfully raw, rustic pieces I've ever seen and it's quite inspiring. There's a reason for this look, though. It's all made of African Ironwood, reclaimed from the first railroad line in South Africa, built in 1888. The Ironwood forests are now protected, thankfully, so the wood Eastique uses comes from the old railroad ties.

They haven't finely sawn and polished the pieces, so they end up with this unparalleled ruggedness. I'll go in evening's order--for cocktails, here's the barchair:

They also offer a barstool with no back, but I thought the chair was more interesting. The stool ends up looking like a dive saloon in the Old West, pardner. It could certainly work in the right context, but this one I think has greater potential.

Next to dinner, here's the "heavy" dining chair:

The "lighter" one and its armed sibling I felt were less successful. They have this sort of Early-American sensibility to them, but the rawness of the wood possibly ruins their tight Shakerish geometry. This one, on the other hand, gives me a sense more of, say, medieval monastery furniture, and I think it's perfect.

Here's the sideboard:

With all of them, I just adore the Primitivism. The contrast this could provide for some ridiculously hyper-modern ceramics, china, or glassware would be absolutely stunning.

By the way, they do also deal in some textiles, here's a brocade tablecloth:

Retiring for coffee and brandy, here's the sofa chair:

I guess I'm picky about upholstery, because I'm not really feeling this fabric. As I discussed in reference to Nolen Niu, here is precisely where I would love to see some bright acid green or shocking blue upholstery fabric. I think it would make this whole thing so incredibly dynamic.

The tables are arguably where these pieces really come into their own. Here's the coffee table:

In a big, fat, flat slab like that, there's nothing to distract you from the gnarly, rugged quality of the wood. It's a more basic shape than with the chairs, for instance, where there's other aesthetic connotations at work, also.

Here are a couple of end tables, which are practically just as successful in my opinion:

The first one, while wonderfully Minimal, I feel is a little bit too crafted. But that second one is especially awesome. It's so incredibly Paleolithic, innocent, honest, and pure.

Off to bed, here's the bed chest, also a great piece:

Now the other part of this story is about Brooklyn's Scott Braun. I had met and spoken with Braun my first year covering BKLYN DESIGNS. I was actually very excited about what he was doing that year, because his work was so robust and had this extremely interesting sort of Exoticism to it. I did post about it, but unfortunately I felt it was a little too wild for a (more traditional) suburban readership in the magazine.

He was the one at the Eastique booth, and was in the Too Busy category, with another visitor occupying his attention--he was alone there, though, which I understand makes it difficult. I stalled because I'd have liked to have gotten caught up with what he's doing lately, but I had way too much to see.

One new piece on his website that I don't remember seeing before is this very elegant "Ilan" bed:

But the reason he's in this post is that he's been contracted by Eastique for a new line of outdoor furniture. While the pieces are more finely crafted (i.e. less primitive), his Exotic aesthetic is a very good match for them, anyway, and it puts an entirely different spin on the rustic materials. His pieces are actually reclaimed Burmese teak. Here's his "Winwood Chaise":

Please forgive the lame screen-grab images. I don't think he means Steve. Again, the robustness is just fantastic, and this strikes me as the kind of thing that would be surprisingly comfortable.

Here's the "Benton Settee":

Here's a case where I don't particularly need contradiction, because I think this would be so wonderfully, organically appropriate in a quiet forest glade. I think that's the first time I've ever used the phrase "forest glade" in a sentence.

Lastly, this is his "Dijo" coffee table:

Those big bronze legs are very characteristic for Braun, really set this piece apart from the ordinary, and by the way I suspect would patina wonderfully over time. I think this is really exquisite, again, with a little flair of the Exotic for good measure.

The Eastique Company

917-749-2192

Scott Braun

917-749-5554

©2008, Ryan Witte

Northern Climates

nea studio, named for designer Nina Edwards Anker, is another small company based in both Oslo and New York.  Some of her work is a little bit harsh for my taste, but all around, there's no question she has talent as a designer.  

Whoever was working her booth, two guys, they were sitting around having a nice little conversation amongst themselves and couldn't be bothered to even acknowledge my presence, despite the fact that I was clearly interested in the work.  I think I even kind of glanced at them expectantly, but they didn't even see me.

Presumably still in the conceptual stage is her "Water Bench":

The precarious balancing act this performs is wonderful--perhaps like the precariousness of our planet's fragile ecosystem?

It's designed for outdoor spaces in regions with extreme climates.  It's a little difficult to tell, but I gather the water in it is sealed over with a thick sheet of glass on top.  In cold weather, it extracts heat from underground to warm the water, and on hot days, it feeds into the city's water supply to cool it down--so it will always be comfortable to sit on.  I assume it feeds the water back into the system uncontaminated, and relies on it only to control its temperature.

This is her "Cape Chair":

It would require the right environment to work really well.  It looks a bit scientific, but it's just so delicate and refined, also.  I think it's quite gorgeous, actually.

This is still my favorite piece of hers, the "Twisted Sofa," which she had on display at the show:

I think this is just exquisitely beautiful.  Very Important Conversation Guys were sitting on it and I guess I can't blame them; it looks extremely comfortable.  I love how the very simple twist of the cushions creates an armrest on one side, and a lounge on the other.  It's Minimalist but almost somehow organic at the same time.  It's actually two foams with different firmness, more firm for the seats, less so for the backrests.  It is a red again, but it's a little bit of a warmer tone that doesn't bother me, and I think the sort of velvety upholstery fabric prevents it from reflecting so much light as to make it jarring.  I kind of want one for my living room.

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