Fashion incubator nurtures Philadelphia talent
Philadelphia is not typically seen as a hotbed of high fashion design, but Macy’s Center City has been trying to change that with its Fashion Incubator initiative, now in its second year.
Famed architect Furness also fascinated with the human facade
The Athenaeum of Philadelphia is the repository of working drawings by the great 19th-century architect Frank Furness.
Currently it has something more whimsical on exhibition. Bulging eyes. Prolonged noses. Mouths twisted in grotesque grimaces.
“He had a great way of looking at your face and finding the couple distinctive features about your cheeks, forehead, or nose, and stretching them to the point where you are recognizable but making you look — frankly — ghastly,” said Michael Lewis, a professor of art history at Williams College.
Lewis curated “Face and Form: The Art and Caricature of Frank Furness,” a selection of drawings from Furness’ personal sketchbooks, most of which are privately held by his descendants and have never been seen publicly.
Throughout his long career as an architect, Furness constantly drew funny faces for his own amusement, often at the expense of friends, clients, and relatives who were the subjects of the drawings. The quick but deftly accomplished illustrations hang beside examples of his architectural work to show that an exaggerated chin and comically sloped forehead are echoed in the bold, expressive elements of his buildings.
It’s only very recently in the history of music that we’ve been able to freeze music into an object. … The form of this object mattered a lot. I once bought vinyl albums and cassette tapes, where there were two first songs per album, Side A and Side B. The energy of a first song makes it stand apart. … Then the CD came along and eliminated Side B and there was only first song. … Then MP3s jumbled my sense of track order, and albums began to feel more like a loose grouping of individual pieces rather than a conceptual whole. … But no effect has been as world changing as that original innovation: freezing music in time onto a recording, where a single version of a song, a single performance of a song, became the song. An inherently mutable method of communication was fundamentally changed.
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| — | 99% Invisible host Roman Mars, introducing his most recent podcast, which examines the difference between a song and a performance. |
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How did Princeton-based Michael Graves — winner of the 1999 National Medal of Arts and the 2001 American Institute of Architects Gold Medal (the highest award bestowed on an architect) — wind up designing household products?
It started with this tea set, which in 1983 could have been yours for $25,000.
(‘Letting off steam’ with princeton architect Michael Graves)
