When I arrived at the ID, Institute of Design, in 1976, very little of László Moholy-Nagy’s legacy was left. Jay Doblin, the next leading director of the school, as it is told, had rubbish trucks come to remove the emptied-out legacies of the Chicago Bauhaus and its traditions. There was a faculty revolt, and a […]
Month: February 2022
Larry Klein
Larry Klein and his wife were our next door neighbor in Evanston, IL, in 1976, when I was appointed to the ID Institute of Design in Chicago, IL. My wife and I moved into a carriage house that originally was connected to the Klein house. The long hall or covered walkway had been removed and […]
Christopher Alexander
Community and Privacy, with Serge Chermayeff (1963) Notes on the Synthesis of Form (1964) A City is Not a Tree (1965) The Atoms of Environmental Structure (1967) A Pattern Language which Generates Multi-service Centers, with Ishikawa and Silverstein (1968) Houses Generated by Patterns (1969) The Grass Roots Housing Process (1973)[46] The Center for Environmental Structure Series, […]
Metaphor and Semantics
For the past thirty years I have been intrigued by the processes of acceptance and integration of new and world changing concepts in the Arts; literature (new styles of unfolding narratives embedded in lyrics, poetry, fiction and journalism), music, dance and stage performance and visual arts and architecture. It is perplexing to see often on […]
A Memory of Human Survival with Dignity
In the mid-seventies I was director of the Institute of Design in Chicago. I started in fall, when swarms of migrating birds would negotiate the city with buildings mostly constructed with glass-curtain walls. Around Crown Hall, the design and architecture studios, every morning one could find hundreds of bird carcasses. Students, staff and teachers, would […]
What is progress?
Industrialization? Urbanization? Globalization? Is it about Efficiency? Expediency? Introducing Scientific, Medical, Technological Solutions? Is it about Modernization, a blind belief in Science and Technology? Has Humankind been able to improve living conditions or the environment? Is it Progress, when the human biology is being ignored, even crippled, when all ecological connections with the environment are […]
James F. Pfeufer
James F. Pfeufer was born in Comfort, TX in 1912. His grandparents were members of the German Freethinker movement who settled the area around 1848. He was raised in Harlem, NY, where he became an artist, scholar and clarinetist. He was high school class valedictorian, and attended City College of New York. A lifelong teacher […]
Design Failure, Safety and Form
By Len D. Singer Len Singer Design and Research , Portsmouth VA, 23703 USAFormer Professor of Industrial Design, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, and Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago. Emeritus Member: Human Factors and Ergonomic Society, Industrial Designers Society of America, and Environmental Design Research Association. Synopsis The objective of this paper […]
Frank Boas, Edward Sapir, and Philip Morrison
I have always been interested in trying to understand my loves, but even more importantly, to understand from where and whom my biases come. What is it that prompted me to prefer something over something else? Who lifted or lowered the curtain over my choice of realities, either tried to shield me or tried to […]
Ivan Massar’s Musings
A Short Biography The many portfolios of his images present a professional photographer’s life-retrospective of a true love for people of all walks of life, the environment and disparate places and moods, and the conflicts engendered by the variety of human and inhumane conditions, from Martin Luther King’s march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, to […]