This article is part of our special Design section on new interpretations of antique design styles.
The confrontation with the reality of mass production
The 40 or so designers represented in “Life Cycles: The Materials of Contemporary Design,” which opens Saturday at the Museum of Modern Art, work with materials that can repair themselves, or be transformed from waste into refined objects, or a marriage between advanced technology and traditional craftsmanship. Their goal is to narrow the gap between the ideals of design and the reality of mass production, with its many human and environmental threats.
For example, Italian design studio Formafantasma collected mobile phone scrap and recycled metal to create its Ore Streams Low Chair (2017), a commentary on the vast amount of electronic waste in the world. (The sloping surfaces of the chair are reminiscent of a flip phone.)
“It is not necessary to sacrifice pleasure, delight and elegance to be responsible for the future of the world,” said Paola Antonelli, senior curator of architecture and design at MoMA, who organized the exhibition of 80 objects, most of which are came from the museum’s collection. , with Maya Ellerkmann, curatorial assistant.
For the only work commissioned for the exhibition, Ghana-based designer and architectural scholar Mae-ling Lokko created a wall panel made from mushroom fibers and coconut shells. Ms. Antonelli said she admired Ms. Lokko’s work for its forensic and poetic approach to the creation of renewable, bio-based materials.
“Today,” said Ms. Antonelli, “we want to know what impact a material will have on a building, a project, the world.” Where do the materials come from and where do they end up? she asked. “The object is just a moment of their life cycle.” Through July 7, 2024. moma.org. — LAURA RASKIN
A reinvented park along the Mississippi River
Tom Lee Park in Memphis — a 30-acre stretch of greenery stretching for miles along the banks of the Mississippi River — is reopening to the public after a major renovation.
Developed by the Memphis River Parks Partnership with a master plan and architecture by Studio Gang and landscape by SCAPE, the reinvention transforms a bare swath of patchy grass into an environment animated by native plantings and trees.
A centerpiece is the Sunset Canopy, a 16,000-square-foot pavilion made up of tripod-like steel columns supporting laminated wood beams and topped by 79 pyramid-shaped roof elements that bring in daylight. The structure, inspired by the riverfront’s industrial history, will contain multiple basketball courts and will serve as a flexible space for community activities and concerts. It was dedicated to Tire Nichols, the 29-year-old black man who was fatally beaten by Memphis police officers at a traffic stop in January.
James Little, a Memphis-born artist known for his precise works of geometric abstraction, translated a painting he created in 2017 called “Democratic Experiment” for the surface under and around the canopy. The new artwork is a vibrant composition of diagonal bars in shades of blue, green, burnt umber, mustard yellow and chartreuse.
“At first I had a problem with the idea of people coming out and playing basketball on top of my image, but I had to get over that,” said Mr Little. Based in New York, the 71-year-old artist got a late-career boost last year when he was represented at the Whitney Biennale, a plum that eluded him for more than four decades.
The 20,000-square-foot pavilion artwork helped him face his fear of working on a very large scale, he said. And he now embraces the interactive and democratic nature of the project, which brings art to citizens who would not normally visit museums. “This play is something no one should feel uninvited to — it is literally for the people,” he said. tomleepark.org. — BETH BROOME
A New York outpost for new and antique tiles
Lee Thornley’s boutique hotel in Cádiz, Spain, the country retreat Casa La Siesta, was the impetus for his handmade tile brand Bert & May. With its walls and floors adorned with antique tiles acquired by Mr Thornley on his way to the landfill, the picturesque property is admired for its Moorish-inspired style.
“Guests were always complimenting the tiles and asking where to find them for their own homes,” he said. “That led me to look for more and put it up for sale.”
His London-based company, founded in 2013, makes its own tiles and also buys antiques. Now it’s expanding into New York City with an outpost at Incolour, a paint store and color showroom at 100 Lafayette Street near TriBeCa, run by Martin Kesselman, an interior designer.
This Bert & May branch will open its full palette of 40 pigments on Tuesday. Handmade tiles, Mr Thornley said, are “as relevant today as they were 100 years ago and will still be 100 years from now.”
Mainstays in the collection include Amanacer cement tiles, a Mediterranean heritage with a soft pink and yellow base. There is also a gold tile with a geometric triangular pattern that Mr. Thornley for Anthropologie, and a series of stripes in a fruit bowl of hues.
Bert & May counts Prince Harry, actress Sienna Miller and the private club Soho House – all continental straddlers with ties to the United States and Great Britain – among their clients. Building a house in New York made sense, Mr Thornley said: “It feels good and even safe.” bertandmay.com. — SHIVANI VORA
A landscape architect donates decades of his photographs
Alan Ward, a landscape architect, has taken thousands of photographs during forty years of travel of landscapes shaped by his peers past and present. A director of the Boston-based Sasaki firm for many years, he has documented Neolithic stone circles in Britain, the rectilinear paths of French royalty, now-lost rows of oaks planted at Dulles International Airport in Virginia in the 1960s, and recent rearrangements of movable metal chairs and seats. Ping pong tables in Bryant Park in Manhattan.
Mr. Ward, 73, is donating his image archive to the Cultural Landscape Foundation, a nonprofit education and advocacy organization based in Washington, DC. Officially known as the Alan Ward Portfolios of Designed Landscapes. They will be included in the foundation’s public online databases. thousands of other historic and contemporary site views. Charles A. Birnbaum, president and general manager of the foundation, said the portfolios documented “ephemeral works of art” at particular points in time, as well as “the realized intentions of the designers” as landscapes matured.
Mr. Ward spent two years organizing his inventory of prints, negatives, transparencies, and digital files for the donation. He shoots primarily in black and white, which brings a “level of abstraction,” he said. Before his travels, he does extensive site research, but upon arrival he said, “I try to let go of all that,” so I can immerse myself in the distinctive characters of the places. He has returned to a number of vantage points year after year and at different times of the day. At dawn, Paris’ Place des Vosges may be a serene uncrowded composition of stone arcades, L-shaped orchards and lawns, but by noon, Mr Ward said, locals and visitors occupy “every patch of grass.” tclf.org. — EVE M. KAHN
