Edited and with essays by Donald Albrecht and Natalie Shivers
Category: Writing
Keep Calm and Carry On
This catalog accompanied the exhibition Keep Calm and Carry On, which traced developments in architecture, engineering, urban planning, fashion, graphics, media, and product and automotive design between 1938 and 1951, a tumultuous 13-year period that spanned the run-up to World War II and its immediate aftermath. From 1939 to 1945, Britain’s creative class mobilized to win the war on the home front. Wartime initiatives spurred new levels of design innovation in a wide range of fields. Architects and engineers created air raid shelters to protect civilians from bombs and missiles and proposed new ideas in architecture and planning to rebuild the nation’s bombed-out cities. Designers in other media conceived fashions and furnishings that saved essential wartime materials while injecting style and beauty into the harsh realities of wartime life. Graphic designers created visually dynamic posters and filmmakers produced inspirational movies that shaped the nation’s behavior and attitudes. Arts promoters also rose to the challenges, forging new and lasting relationships between museums, artists, musicians, the British government, and the public. The end of the war in 1945 accelerated these progressive trends with a series of exhibitions presenting new and innovative ideas.
Credits
Catalog design: Pure + Applied
Photographs: John Halpern
The Nature of Design
Co-edited with Dianne Pierce
This book accompanied an exhibition of the same name, which explored the work and philosophy of Hudson River Valley resident and renowned industrial designer Russel Wright. The show and book focused on one of Wright’s most pervasive preoccupations, and one with much current relevance: the relationship of humankind with the natural world. While examining Wright’s entire career from the 1920s through the 1970s, the exhibition will focus on his work between 1945 and 1968, a less-scrutinized period when Wright increasingly designed in experimental and innovative ways.
Credits
Co-editor: Dianne Pierce
Designer: Office of Communications & Marketing/Design Services, State University of New York at New Paltz; Senior Designer Jeff Lesperance, based on an initial concept design by Randall Martin.
Doris Duke’s Shangri La
Co-edited with Thomas Mellins
This catalog accompanied the traveling exhibition that explores Doris Duke’s Shangri La, a five-acre estate overlooking the Pacific Ocean in Honolulu. Begun in the mid-1930s and developed over the course of more than fifty years, Shangri La seamlessly melds together modern architecture, tropical landscape, and art from throughout the Islamic world. Representing an approach that may be termed “inventive synthesis,” Shangri La mixes original and commissioned architectural elements, sometimes incorporating complete historic rooms that function as museum-quality period installations. Shangri La’s collections are equally diverse and encompass a broad time spectrum, from the pre-Islamic and mediaeval periods through the mid-20th century, as well as myriad media, styles, and techniques developed within the realm of the Islamic arts. The exhibition combined artifacts, photographs, drawings, and ephemera, as well as works of five artists who have participated in Shangri La’s artists-in-residence program.
Credits
Co-editor: Thomas Mellins
Principal photography by Tim Street-Porter
Designer: Abbott Miller/Pentagram
Publisher: Skira/Rizzoli
Bel Geddes Designs America
Norman Bel Geddes Designs America accompanied the first major traveling retrospective to explore the figure the New York Times recently dubbed “the Leonardo de Vinci of the 20th century.” When you drive on an interstate highway, attend a multimedia Broadway show, dine in a sky-high revolving restaurant, or watch a football game in an all-weather stadium, you owe a debt of gratitude to Bel Geddes. A promethean figure who was equally comfortable in the realms of fact and fantasy, Geddes was both a visionary and a pragmatist who had a significant role in shaping not only modern America, but also the nation’s image of itself as leading the way into the future. He was a polymath who had no schooling or professional training in the activities he mastered, which included designing stage sets, costumes, and lighting; creating theater buildings, offices, nightclubs, and houses, as well as their furnishings, from vacuum cleaners to cocktail sets; and authoring oracular books and articles that landed him and his prophesies on the front page of newspapers across the country.
Credits
Designer: Sarah Gifford
Publisher: Abrams
Fentress Airports
Now Boarding: Fentress + The Architecture of Flight explored the work of Denver-based architect Curt Fentress, who emerged as one of the world’s leading airport architects with the completion of the terminal complex for Denver International Airport in 1995. Since then, he and his firm have designed airports in the United States and Asia that exemplify the most innovative ideas in architectural design, passenger experience, and regional planning. To provide context to the architect’s work, the exhibition included a timeline of airport and airplane history, artifacts exploring air travel in popular culture, a specially commissioned media installation about air travel today, and digital speculations on the airport of the future.
Credits
Publisher: Denver Art Museum and Scala Publishers
Designer: Robert Aufuldish/Aufuldish and Warinner
Cecil Beaton: The NY Years
Andrée Putman
Cars, Culture, and the City
Cars, Culture, and the City explored how the car shaped modern-day New York, while, at the same time, New York shaped America’s romance with the car. From the early 20th century through today, New Yorkers’ invention of innovative ways to accommodate cars and pedestrians, such as multi-level streets, and the construction of bridges and tunnels made the city the epicenter of a vast, tri-state region. In the formative decades from the turn of the century through the 1960s, New Yorkers also built the auto showrooms and hosted the annual auto shows and world’s fairs that created the magic of American car culture. The exhibition was accompanied by a 100-page catalog.
Mr. Albrecht and his co-curator developed the idea of the show and catalog, selected all the artifacts, and wrote the exhibition text and catalog.
See exhibition
Co-authored with Phil Patton
Credits
Publisher: Museum of the City of New York
Designer: Pure+Applied
Global Citizen: Moshe Safdie
Global Citizen: The Architecture of Moshe Safdie accompanies a major traveling exhibition that explores this renowned architect’s buildings and the philosophy that shapes them. Safdie’s career has traced a remarkable trajectory in the canon of modern architecture, from the 1960s when the twenty nine-year-old architect designed Habitat, one of the century’s most significant experiments in prefabricated housing, until today, when he practices within an ever-expanding global architectural culture. Safdie’s canonical works combine the social activism and advanced technologies of modernism with profound respect for historic and regional context. For his diverse clients, Safdie has created buildings where communities are forged of strangers, memory is enshrined, and identity is created in built form. This book examines Safdie’s role in contemporary architecture, as well as his use of architecture for advancing political, religious, and cultural agendas. Also included is a unique illustrated essay by Safdie examining the architect’s thoughts on the global city in the 21st century.
Credits
Designer: Pure+Applied