At the beginning of every festival season, in winter, there is a lot of loneliness surging up in me, no matter how hard I try to cover it up. I felt always abandoned, from childhood on, especially by my parents – my mother died early and left me unprotected to life; my father always felt, […]
History
Płakowice Castle
Płakowice Castle, is located in Plagwitz (Płakowice), Lower Silesia, which was German before 1945, and is now Polish. Plagwitz (Płakowice) is one of the oldest settlements, having been mentioned in the Register of Municipalities of Lower Silesia from 1217 onwards. In the history between competing and feudal families, the village changed ownership several times and […]
MIT: Some Notes on the Unwritten History
It is somewhat dumbfounding to realize how some persons rewrite reality, especially in Design History, which in many ways does not really matter. Design would always like to play a bigger role than all the other professions which aid us in making each day. Still, it is quite amusing to see documents full of little […]
James F. Pfeufer, My Sponsor
James F. Pfeufer, 88, died at home on February 6, 2001. He was the husband of Rika Henderson and the late Reed Champion Pfeufer. Mr. 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 […]
Nicholas Negroponte
. . . avanti, avanti, avanti, you avant garde architect . . . have gall, guts, audacity, cheek, . . . jaunt gallantly onward . . . just don’t gallivant from gala to gala . . . don’t lose, but guard your integrity . . . because in your exuberance wanting to be the center […]
My WGBH Experience
In the early seventies (1970), Hartford Gunn resigned as general manager of WGBH to assume the presidency of the newly formed Public Broadcasting Service in Washington. Stan Calderwood, former chairman of the board, Polaroid Corporation, having just been appointed President of the WGBH Educational Foundation, invited me to make an elaborate design presentation of concepts […]
MIT Press
The MIT Press is a university press affiliated with MIT, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts MIT’s publishing operations were first formally instituted by the creation of an imprint called “Technology Press” in 1932. This imprint was founded by James R. Killian, Jr., at the time editor of MIT’s Technology Review alumni magazine. He […]
MIT Office of Publications Legacy
The authorship of many documents designed by the staff of the MIT Office of Publication have never been verified or corrected. So one will find resumes by Muriel, Jackie and Ralph that are erroneous. The reason for this is that they were copied over and over again by many publications who never checked in with […]
More Thoughts on MIT
I would question the scholarship. This must have been concocted by a “design historian”, but not by a researcher or scholar trained in the discipline of art history. From my vantage point, theres is no way in which Muriel Cooper would have been in the position of appointing/hiring Jackie Casey. I agree, that Muriel was […]
The Harvard Business Review
Unfortunately, I have always made snap decisions, never weighing financial security in favor over personal integrity. Driving home from a day of pure misery at WGBH, I made the decision to quit the next morning, and did. Without discussing or weighing circumstance or ramification, I had my wife’s approval. My family had come through WW […]