Fashion personality who found fame in her 80s went from copywriter at Women’s Wear Daily to design authority whose projects included the White House
Iris Apfel, the interior designer and fashion tastemaker who found fame as an octogenarian, has died aged 102.
Apfel’s agent, Lori Sale, confirmed her death on Friday, and said “working alongside her was the honour of a lifetime”.
Continue reading...The London museum has been granted special access to the world-famous toy’s archives in California and will explore her history ‘through a design lens’
If this summer’s blockbuster movie has left you longing for more Barbie in your life, help is at hand. An exhibition on the history of the world-famous long-legged doll is to open at the Design Museum in London next year.
The museum says it has been granted special access to the Barbie archives in California, and dozens of rare and unique items will be displayed to tell the story of the brand over the course of 65 years.
Continue reading...Militant pensioner says a majority want a traditional feature but project leaders call row an attack on democracy
Ilkley is an affluent, leafy town, one point of Yorkshire’s “Golden Triangle” where average house prices top £560,000. Last year it was named the best place to live in the UK, and its tree-lined streets hark back to the days when it was a spa town where wealthy Victorians took the waters, Charles Darwin among them.
Now the peace and quiet of this favourite municipality of the middle-classes is being rocked by a row between the, often older, traditionalists in the town and a charitable body of volunteers who were hoping to give it just a flick of a modern makeover. The fight centres on the proposed design of a fountain, to be built at the heart of the town at the junction of its two wide shopping avenues.
Continue reading...Exclusive: 15-metre-long work made up of 650,000 Lego bricks to form part of artist’s biggest UK show in eight years
Claude Monet’s monumental triptych, Water Lilies 1914 -26, which depicts nature’s tranquil beauty as part of the French impressionist’s world-famous series, will take on new meaning in a giant recreation by artist and activist Ai Weiwei in his new London exhibition.
Monet’s brushstrokes in his water and reflection landscapes are replaced by about 650,000 studs of Lego bricks, in 22 vivid colours, in the 15-metre-long work at the centre of Weiwei’s biggest UK show in eight years, opening next month.
Continue reading...The designer of the glasshouses at Kew Gardens fell out of favour – but supporters of a new museum hope to change all that
One major name is missing from the line-up of great British architects that students learn have shaped the way that Britain looks. And it is a name with quite a ring to it: Decimus Burton.
Now members of the Decimus Burton Society believe they are about to put that right by establishing this Victorian classical revivalist’s place alongside better known titans such as Christopher Wren, John Nash and Edwin Lutyens. A new museum celebrating his achievements is on the drawing board and awaits approval this spring.
Continue reading...Pair of red triangular Phryges meant to represent floppy conical hats linked to French Revolution
France’s mascots for the 2024 Olympic Games have been likened to a giant “clitoris in trainers”, with the French newspaper Libération hailing it as a revolutionary departure from the traditional phallic symbol of the Eiffel Tower.
When the two triangular red mascots, the Phryges, were unveiled for the Olympic and Paralympic Games, they were presented as the shape of Phrygian caps, the floppy, conical hats associated with the French Revolution.
Continue reading...Free exhibition will include some of creative’s architectural projects and draw from his west African roots
The bold colours and striking patterns of Yinka Ilori’s furniture, homeware, textiles and billboard graphics are to be celebrated for the first time in a free museum exhibition.
Ilori, who grew up in a Nigerian household in north London, has drawn inspiration from west African textiles in his artwork and designs.
Continue reading...The Swedish-born artist, who turned objects such as baseball bats, saws and clothespins into giant sculptures, died in Manhattan
Pop artist Claes Oldenburg, who turned the mundane into the monumental through his outsized sculptures of a baseball bat, a clothespin and other objects, has died at age 93.
Oldenburg died Monday morning in Manhattan, according to his daughter, Maartje Oldenburg. He had been in poor health since falling and breaking his hip a month ago.
Continue reading...Energy-efficient passive design is catching on in New York and other cities as climate concerns rise
The first night Stephanie Silva spent at her new Brooklyn apartment was uncommonly quiet. So was the following morning and the next day. The 32-year-old native New Yorker had forgotten the last time she was able to mute the city of 8.2 million.
“It’s like a sanctuary,” Silva says, but as soon as she opens the street-facing windows, the bustling outside noise fills her living room. Once she closed the windows again, the difference was instantly noticeable. “Since moving here my anxiety went out the window,” Silva says, referring to the 10th-floor affordable apartment in Ocean Hill, part of the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn. But what sets this 67-unit building apart from the rest of the housing in the city is its “passive” element.
Continue reading...Faced with increasing state violence, young people across Myanmar are learning to fight. This is one young woman’s story
In the year since the 1 February coup, young people across Myanmar have risked their lives to resist military rule.
At least 295 young people aged 18-25 have been killed in the military’s suppression of the pro-democracy movement. More than 1,000 have been arrested, according to the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners. In response, thousands have left their homes and families to train as revolutionary fighters.
JC is a young artist and illustrator from Myanmar’s ethnic Karen community. She was born in Myanmar and raised on the Thai-Myanmar border
Continue reading...The famous diarist’s dedicated building, left to his Cambridge alma mater, could not be altered. So architect Níall McLaughlin created a magical solution
“My delight is in the neatness of everything,” wrote Samuel Pepys in his diary in 1663, “and so cannot be pleased with anything unless it be very neat, which is a strange folly.”
He was referring in part to the fastidious organisation of his magnificent collection of books. By the time of his death in 1703 he had amassed 3,000 of them, which he left to his alma mater, Magdalene College, Cambridge, to be housed in a dedicated building with his name above the door. He gave strict instructions that his library be kept intact for posterity, without addition or subtraction, its contents arranged “according to heighth” in the bespoke glass-fronted bookcases he had especially commissioned. The responsibility came with an added threat: if one volume goes missing, he instructed, the whole library must be transferred to Trinity.
Continue reading...In this extract from a book compiling artworks made by Donwood and Yorke for Radiohead, the pair discuss how alienation with Cool Britannia saw them retreat into landscapes, labyrinths and inadvertently inventing Twitter
Stanley Donwood I can’t believe the innocent world we lived in when we were making this work. It was before 9/11, before the “war on terror”, before the conjoining of the police and the military – all of the social changes that have led towards the position we now find ourselves in. It wasn’t possible to know what was going on around the world in the same way that it is now, when news has become a sort of surrogate entertainment.
Thom Yorke Everybody involved felt like we’d been in some weird circus for quite a while, after OK Computer. Personally, I mentally completely crashed, as did Stan. We all did, in a way. Rather than immersing ourselves in this congratulatory atmosphere around us, we felt the total opposite. There was this fierce desire to be totally on the outside of everything that was going on, and a fierce anger, and suspicion. And that permeated everything. It was completely out of proportion, deeply unhealthy – but that’s where we were at.
Continue reading...Matt Gibberd, founder of high-end architectural estate agency The Modern House, shares his top tips
For the past 16 years, I have spent my days nosing round other people’s homes like a design-obsessed basset hound. I have been granted access through hundreds of locked doors, perched on wobbly Windsor chairs, and taken tea in stylish studio flats, cleverly converted factories and even a working barge.
Throughout all this, I’ve learned a lot. As The Modern House has grown, I’ve discovered that these homes – from studio flats to listed architectural masterpieces – have the same design principles in common: clever layouts, masterly manipulation of natural light, tactile materials, a connection to nature, sheer exuberance and personality in decoration – and much more.
Continue reading...Though 25 years apart in age, their ideas are locked in sync. Andreas Kronthaler, husband of the couture queen, reveals his plans for the maverick fashion house
On 21 March 2020, days before Britain’s initial lockdown, Vivienne Westwood shared her first isolation address to the nation. Royalty, of sorts, she delivered it in her trademark fashion: she spoke of saving the planet and her new manifesto, while donning couture – and surrounded by curiosities – in her south London home.
These impassioned speeches became a year-long weekly occurrence. Westwood offered anti-racism, anti-capitalism, and a stern rebuke of the arms trade; in wig, blue dress and floral-print platforms, she spoke of the need to rescue the oceans, while standing in her tiled bathtub.
Continue reading...The model and actor has a new household installation - a pink tunnel where she goes to think. Vulval art and design has an ancient history, but it’s becoming more popular than ever
Should you swap all your doors for a vagina tunnel? This is the pressing question raised by a video tour from the model and actor Cara Delevingne, who takes Architectural Digest around her LA home, and I believe the answer has to be “yes”. In her living room, a secret door in the mirrored panelling reveals a soft pink opening. Crawl right in, take the dog with you (Delevingne does). “I come in here to think, I come in here to create, I feel inspired in the vagina tunnel,” says Delevingne.
Delevingne, and her architect, Nicolò Bini, were inspired, she says repeatedly, by Alice in Wonderland, but this is more like a vulval version of the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe – the Chronicles of Labia, if you like. You climb out through a washing machine at the other end – “rebirthed and cleansed!” cries our host. The vagina’s rebirth powers are strong: Delevingne’s terrier goes in, and comes out a husky. The theme continues through the rest of the house: there is a floral display in her bedroom (“This lovely bouquet of vagina flowers”) and a “pussy palace”, a tactile pink suedette-lined secret room complete with swing and mirrored ceiling.
Continue reading...Standing on a corner of downtown Chicago as a dazzling rocket ship of mirrored glass and salmon pink steel, the James R Thompson Center, more than any other building, encapsulates the flamboyant oeuvre of the German-American architect Helmut Jahn, who has died aged 81 in a cycling accident.
The glitzy government building, originally known as the State of Illinois Center, is a fitting monument to the larger than life architect, as exuberant as it is divisive.
Continue reading...A petition, signed by more than 54,000 people, calls on Biden to return the garden to its ‘former glory’ as Jacqueline Kennedy designed
Efforts to erase the Trump family legacy have reached the White House potting sheds and nurseries with Jill Biden being urged to restore the mansion’s garden to a state that predates ex-First Lady Melania Trump’s 2019 makeover.
An online petition calling on the first lady to return the Rose Garden to its “former glory” has been signed by more than 54,000 people. The petition says Biden’s predecessor “had the cherry trees, a gift from Japan, removed as well as the rest of the foliage and replaced with a boring tribute to herself”.
Continue reading...Carmen Mazarrasa builds exquisite doll’s houses where she can control everything – except when the mice decide to move in…
At moments of unrest I open Instagram and scroll impatiently until I see what I need to see, and then I exhale, a gleeful loosening. What I am looking for is something recognisable – a plant, a pencil, a chair, a bowl of dumplings – shrunk to a fraction of its size. How to describe the pleasure, the sweet, squealy pleasure of studying a miniature iPhone, suitable only for a busy mouse, or smoked salmon bagel that would fit on the head of a pin, or a set of tools balanced on a fingernail? My favourites are the miniatures that are truly banal – a plug extension lead on @DailyMini recently thrilled me, as did a rack of postcards showing scenes from holidays appropriate only for ants. In those moments of tightening stress, when the world feels far too large, I have plenty to choose from.
The world of tiny things is growing. Artists sculpting miniature objects have found new audiences on Instagram and clients on Etsy – a recent purchase of mine on eBay was a gutted fish on a plate, at 1/12th its real size. I am also watching a pack of crumpets. Once the stuff of elderly hobbyists, over the past decade miniature making among millennials has seen a boom. The queen of the miniacs is Carmen Mazarrasa, whose tiny rooms, filled with covetable things, make the viewer feel wobbly, both at the scale and their desire. Because it’s not just that the rooms of rugs or ceramics or beds look real, it’s that they look like rooms you might see in Architectural Digest, filled with artful paintings and replicas of iconic chairs.
Continue reading...After embarking accidentally on his career, Pappenheim has created innovative soundscapes for theatre, opera and radio
Max Pappenheim’s journey into sound design comprises a series of happy accidents. Music – and especially organ music – was his first love. He spent a year as a cathedral organist and it was only his predilection for experimentation and finding “the weirdest corners of the repertoire” that stopped him from pursuing a professional career in liturgical music.
Instead, he went to Cambridge University, read classics and began teaching at a school in the Midlands. There, he was asked to direct a musical, Sweeney Todd, and it was then the ground began to shift beneath his feet.
Continue reading...He built wild, magical buildings and furniture that is still thrilling today. But a new film suggests the celebrated Finn was also a domineering philanderer deeply indebted to his talented wives
Wonky lumps of misshapen, scorched bricks burst from a block of student flats in Cambridge, Massachusetts, giving a warty look to the long wall that winds its way along the Charles River. “The lousiest bricks in the world,” is how Finnish architect Alvar Aalto described the local New England materials he used for his Baker House dorms at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1947. It was meant as a compliment – he loved their twisted, blackened, brutish texture, which gave the walls the look of coarse tweed.
The pockmarked wall is one of many such strange and beautiful things covered in a new feature-length documentary film about Aalto, Finland’s most famous designer export and one of the most celebrated architects of the 20th century, who built a career on his obsessive attention to material details. Always thinking about the human experience of moving through a building, he considered everything from the feel of a leather-wrapped door handle to the pleasure of a misshapen brick.
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