Summer, like the air in the autumn, always makes me nostalgic. For what, though, I’m not entirely sure. A few years back, I spent the summer in the Catskills at the Sugar Maples Center for Creative Arts as an artist assistant and instructor. It was a beautiful time and every year, I miss those days.

Seventy-five years prior to my tenure there, Sugar Maples opened as a small hotel which soon turned into a comprehensive resort accommodating up to 700 guests. For about 50 years, the resort grew as families spent summer vacations enjoying the activities offered (horseback riding, pool fun, various contests, the like). In the 1980s, however, popularity began to decline and in the 90s, the entire plot of land was sold to a developer who never touched the place. The buildings, stocked with the hotel’s ephemera and objects, decayed. Twenty-five years later, I totally raided those buildings.

It’s unclear why popularity of the resort, and the industry, faded. Perhaps it was the change in guests’ expectations or the prohibition of alcohol at Sugar Maples. Whatever the case, buildings were hastily abandoned and years later, donated to the Catskill Mountain Foundation.

When I arrived – in a rainstorm, parking in a puddle of mud – the buildings were off limits to the public. Along with my friend Roberta , we explored every abandoned space we could find, collecting the probably asbestos-laden things. As I’m going through my old things, I thought some of this stuff is worth sharing from both a design and nostalgia-loving point of view.

I spent this past weekend near Sugar Maples, at the Washington Irving Inn in Hunter. One thing I love about the area, Tannersville specifically, is the handmade quality of many of the signs and buildings. Here are a few pictures from the weekend, including a shot of the new Sugar Maples. And, yes, I went to the Zoom Flume.

[In order from top to bottom, the photographs: Sugar Maples; Washington Irving Inn (sign); the Library at the Inn; Zoom Flume; Last Chance Cheese Shop (sign); Colgate Lake.] Sigh.

These are my feet on the escalator to the sixth floor. Exciting.

My brother’s feet. He’s classy.

If you’re me, you didn’t exactly know what Bauhaus was besides a typeface and a pretty sign you saw somewhere once in Connecticut…up until last week. Embarrassing. (Also, it’s pronounced Bow-howse.) Turns out to be a really interesting movement.

The Bauhaus was a school founded in Weimar, Germany in 1919 by the architect Walter Gropius upon the concept of bringing all of the arts together. The idea was to bring together craft and industry, to create functional and beautiful and beautifully made objects. As with the Modernism movement, technology is seen as a positive and utilitarian element in art, according to the Bauhaus doctrine. (It should be noted here that the Bauhaus movement seems largely formal, meaning concerned with form. Meaning that materials, shapes and compositions were rigorously explored, whereas the development of concepts seems to have been secondary, if at all considered.)

A diagram of the Basics Curriculum. (Source: DesignHistory.org.)

Although the school only lasted for fourteen years and was constantly undergoing major transitions in personnel and locations (the exhibition is broken down into years/locations), the work developed at the school became a profound art movement, greatly influencing the Modernist movement, which was about forty years underway at the time of the school’s establishment.

Color analysis of a Madonna painting, Paul Citroen, c. 1921.

One thing I really enjoyed about the show, which did not allow photographs, was seeing the assignments of students like Josef Albers and Wassily Kandinsky. Even though as students their work demonstrates a kind of precision and focus, it is a reminder that we all have roots somewhere. Kandinsky and everyone else developed their craft as creative problem-solvers over time.

Some lovely postcards designed in the Bauhaus. Forgive the blurriness; camera was being used in stealth mode.

There’s something beautiful in Gropius’ Bauhaus Manifesto, in the concept of the workshop environment. Building is so fundamental to the human body, and so basic to our knowledge. What better way to connect with something (materials, others, ideas) than to make a tangible object? I like this.

Last fall, I began my illustration class by having the students make their own sketchbooks (a lesson plan lifted from one of my own teachers). We spent a couple of hours folding paper, sewing and finally trimming our books. At the end of class, several students came up to me and said they had no idea they could make their own books. I had no idea I could make my own books either, until I tried out of frustration one day. But what a beautiful exercise, empowering students to build a piece of their own world; to make something using their own hands.

Check out MoMA’s pretty if art-lacking Bauhaus Website for more information about the show, running until January 25.

The water and sand were rather lovely, too.

A relaxing and beautiful way to bring in a new year. For 2010, look forward to more news from the Letterpress Collective, some hand-made books, some new writing and of course some drawing too. Happy new decade!

Continuing on with my adventures in New York City, last night I had the pleasure of attending the AIGA/NY Fresh Dialogue 25, titled Design Blogging is Changing the World. I wanted to know if this was in fact true. In an almost-full auditorium at Parsons, four leading bloggers presented their work and then participated in a moderated dialogue, answering questions from the audience and our moderator, Alice Twemlow.

Twemlow, a design critic, writer and chair of the MFA Design Criticism program at SVA, eloquently introduced the bloggers and presented the audience with the questions that should be answered by the end of the night, which was helpful in directing our attention. Questions like how bloggers know what to post and when; how do they create a recognizable voice; is blogging a means of disseminating critical thinking about design. Here is a summary of the evening.

Twemlow presenting our speakers.

Kicking off the presentations was Khoi Vinh, creator of subtraction.com and Design Director of the NewYorkTimes.com. Khoi, who’s been blogging since at least 1997, noted the changes he’s seen over the years. One major shift involves the individual and the network. As blogs become increasingly easy to obtain and keep, the design of them is becoming secondary to the power of the network. He pointed to flickr sites in which artists communicate their ideas/portfolios through what they post (images and folder titles). This is a way of tapping into the [flickr] network (and all of its many members and marketing capabilities) without actually maintaining a written blog.

Vinh’s dog, Mister President, also has a blog.

Next up was Allan Chochinov, a contributing author of Core77 and teacher at Pratt and SVA. Allan took us through the interesting visual history of Core77, describing everything it was and is. He used axioms like Everything’s a Story. Everything’s a Community. Everything’s a Platform. Everything’s a [fill in the blank]. And he’s right. Blogs are all of these things. I think the most compelling word he used was community. A blog is a virtual, almost real-time community in which there are active participants. Rather than creating something static (as in a book, which isn’t actually static but just slower to be interactive), blogs create a space in which humans can communicate and connect with one another quickly, and anyone [with an internet-connected computer] can tap into this. (I also happily note that Chochinov is dedicated to sustainable practices. See one of his interesting articles here.)

Eisenberg’s Swiss Miss blog.

We then heard from the very dynamic Tina Roth Eisenberg, creator and sole-writer of Swiss Miss, a blog which began as an archive of the things Tina likes and became an on-going commentary on design and culture. Tina spoke rather beautifully, I must say, about the way in which she sees blogging as a means of connection with other humans. Through documenting her observations (which she posts), she is able to connect.

Cool Hunting creates weekly videos and posts them. One of their favorite projects was this video showing letterpress printers (!) from Brazil.

Our last speaker was Josh Rubin, creator and editor of Cool Hunting, a site which posts interesting/uncommon products that intersect design, culture, technology and art. Basically the blog is a catalog of observations, similar to Swiss Miss, kind of like the new, virtual form of collecting (a centuries-old human tendency). Rubin thinks the future of blogs is a romance with analog; going back to handmade things, showing the beauty of crafts.

Left to right: Twemlow, Chochinov , Rubin, Vinh, Eisenberg.

After the presentations there was a brief dialogue. Twemlow asked why bloggers aren’t having a more critical discussion of design. One response was that blogs might not be adding value to the field by commenting critically in the blogosphere. What?! Designers need critical thinkers and examiners of the craft in order to think better themselves, in order to develop the field. As Twemlow said early in the night, blogs have the ear of the design community. Critical dialogue (what makes something cool or not; what does this say about who we are, etc) is essential to our field, to our thinking, particularly because of the democracy of our industry. Anyone can be a designer; what separates the better from the good is the quality of mind behind the solutions. The question, then, is which blogs want to take on this role in the design community?

One major take-away for me was the personality behind the blogs. Perhaps most evident in Swiss Miss, Eisenberg noted that this was a space for her personal archive, for things she likes and even commenting on her own life. This is a way for her readers to connect with her, to learn what/how she thinks. And I think this is what we are all looking for, the story behind the human, behind the writing. It’s really quite a lovely idea.

Full disclosure: this picture is actually from last year’s super duper sledding slope.

I left the city this morning for the country house in Connecticut (also known as my father’s house) where I’ll be spending most of the holidays with my ridiculously large family, drinking cheap wine, eating lots of food and reading up a storm. I might also try to make a book or two, but no promises. More pictures to come.

First on the list was the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum where the Design for a Living World Exhibit is soon to close. A few months ago, I learned about this exhibit and read up on the designers and projects involved. Basically, the Nature Conservancy wanted to “raise awareness about the impact and promise of sustainable sourcing.” To do this, they found ten high-profile designers and sent them off to “harvest materials from the world’s most beautiful and fragile places.” This concept raised some questions for me (ok, a lot) so I thought I’d check the exhibit out for myself.

The first thing one might notice about the museum, housed in a beautiful mansion formerly belonging to the Carnegie family, is how hands-off it is. Even in the showcase for the Design USA gallery, in which award-winning/field-changing design books are shown, one can’t touch the books. Really? They’re just books, C-H.

Moving along, to the second floor of the museum, I found the show I was looking for.

The design of the actual exhibition is superb. The entire second floor is broken into several rooms, cleverly designed and easily navigable, each of which housed one or two of the projects. Explanations, maps and photographs documenting the designer’s experience are all printed on aluminum (from 94% recycled content, we’re repeatedly told) and hung cleanly around the walls. (The origin of the lovely-looking wood holding the aluminum is Bolivia, an FSC-certified Spanish Cedar. The show is made to travel. I learned this on the Cooper-Hewitt Blog.) The typography is clean (I’m guessing Scala but I’m no expert); the palette is limited, earthy and charming. The content is easily accessible.

What concerns me, though, are the subtleties of the exhibition; of the inherent concept of the exhibition, in fact. While I’m entirely onboard with the goal of raising awareness of the issues facing our environment and us, and even utilizing celebrity to achieve this, it seems to me that only a few of the designers actually demonstrated passion for preserving the environment, for creating practical solutions. For instance, Isaac Mizrahi, who designed an incredibly beautiful and elegant salmon-skin dress, says in an interview that glamour cannot be sacrificed for eco-friendly products.

This comment, and maybe this entire show, indicates a certain distance from the actual root of the issue of consumption. In other words, rather than focus on this culture we’ve created of products and desire, we are still looking at the products here.

Next, the photographs hanging on the walls often show indigenous-seeming people. I can only imagine they are indigenous because many or all are not named. Also, they rarely speak in the videos. This creates a distance between the viewer/audience/participant (today, me) and the actual community the materials came from; it indicates a certain other-ness and voicelessness of the people inhabiting the land from which the designers took materials.

Speaking of the communities, why would we be exploring the most “fragile” environments for materials and then utilizing said materials back in the United States? Why not think locally? Why not think in terms of accessible and prevalent materials? Perhaps part of the point of the show is to demonstrate how a community might grow economically, but the projects themselves seem to contradict that. (I’m exaggerating a little. Two of the projects harvested materials from the U.S. Maya Lin found sustainably harvested trees in Maine and Christien Meinderstma used sheep’s wool in Idaho to make rugs, as seen above. Both of these designers seemed genuinely invested in their missions here.)

Surprisingly few people have examined this show critically, as far as I can tell. Even NPR gave more of a promotional advertisement than an investigation of the meaning behind this show’s existence. In an interview for ID Magazine, R.I.P, Abbott Miller, a designer in the show, and Ellen Lupton, a curator for the museum and designer herself, noted that the show was meant to be open-ended, to be inconclusive. So, my question to the you is: do you accept the ideology of this show? Is this good enough? Is inconclusiveness regarding the environment an acceptable response to the knowledge of today’s world? And, am I missing something?