(All images © Elsbeth Struijk van Bergen)

Above: Elsbeth Struijk van Bergen: “Robijnhof 13: Kitchen”

In the late 1950’s Gerrit Rietveld was commissioned to design a modernist, suburban paradise on the outskirts of Utrecht, The Netherlands. The management companies originally wanted architect J. J. P. Oud to do the job, but thankfully Oud convinced them that the “young” Mr. Rietveld was quite capable of designing the 194 rental dwellings by himself, with Oud as an unofficial, uncredited “supervisor”.

The resulting new neighborhood was a success. When the blue-collar tenants moved in to their new apartments they enjoyed a plethora of modern conveniences (hot water! showers! laundry spaces! ventilated kitchens!)
which had mostly been out of their reach so far.
In addition, their daily activities now took place in a typical Rietveldian space, filled with air and light, clean lines, and some of the clever traits of the Rietveld Schröder House in that same city, such as sliding walls and multi-functionional built-ins—albeit on a more modest scale.

Above: Elsbeth Struijk van Bergen: “Robijnhof 13: Coal Shed”

The entire complex was recently extensively renovated, from each interior to all the public spaces, under the supervision of Bertus Mulder, who was Rietveld’s right hand man for many years. To celebrate the occasion, the current management company, Bo-Ex (who previously restored other Rietveld projects), commissioned one of my best friends, Dutch photographer Elsbeth Struijk van Bergen, to document Robijnhof 13, the dwelling which has, post-renovation, become the project’s museum apartment.
Thanks to Robijnhof 13, which has been completely restored to its original state and was furnished with Pastoe and Rietveld furniture from around 1960, we can see what Rietveld envisioned, even though we look at it 50 years after the first inhabitants moved in. I love the drab pistachio color, combined with frosted glass and plywood, and the terrazzo bathroom sink with the white canvas skirt. Timeless and Dutch, no gimmicks necessary.

Elsbeth applied her usual sense of hyper-deliberate composition to the photographs.
She was asked to photograph modern people in the museum apartment, and to emphasize its timeless lines and functionality, rather then focus on its “retro” qualities.
To quote from the accompanying publication, “Rietvelds Robijnhof” , about Elsbeth’s series: “The space and the human characters engage in an interaction that frees the apartment from the (art)historical context, to reveal its intrinsical values.”
I couldn’t have said it better myself. Please enjoy a further selection from Elsbeth’s series:

Above: Elsbeth Struijk van Bergen: “Robijnhof 13: Living Room to Kitchen”

Above: Elsbeth Struijk van Bergen: “Robijnhof 13: Desk”

Above: Elsbeth Struijk van Bergen: “Robijnhof 13: Hallway”

Above: Elsbeth Struijk van Bergen: “Robijnhof 13: Living Room”

Above: Elsbeth Struijk van Bergen: “Robijnhof 13: Bathroom”

Above: Elsbeth Struijk van Bergen: “Robijnhof 13: Front Door”

Links:
>Elsbeth Struijk van Bergen’s site
>Centraal Museum Utrecht, who operate the museum apartment, will have an extensive Rietveld show called Rietveld’s Universe.
The Centraal Museum Utrecht is also where you can get more info on visiting Robijnhof 13.
>Elsbeth’s Robijnhof series was published in its entirety in a small book, entirely in Dutch, called “Rietvelds Robijnhof – De geschiedenis van een moderne Utrechtse buurt”, published by Thoth Publishers. ISBN 978 906868 4810.

My South African friend Johno has known me since I was a little Amsterdam boy, naïve and fresh-out-of-art school (yes, I really did just say that, so shut up!). For whatever it is worth, he’s has been a huge influence on me, and he introduced me to the notion—or better yet, was living proof that fabulous and exciting things may happen to you if you leave your town of birth, and relocate to a bigger place, to meet a lot of people who made the same choice. I followed his advice, but since “exciting” is in the eye of the beholder, I will never objectively be able to tell you how exhilarating of a turn my life took for it. Johno practiced what he preached, and was indeed very fabulous and flew and moved all over the place for decades, until he went back to where he once belonged: South Africa. Where he lives with his twin brother David, who also used to move and fly all over the place.

I had the pleasure of interviewing Johno for BUTT magazine in 2002 (!), and while I won’t publish the entire interview—because it gets into more detail than I think Johno would care to have googlable for all eternity—I’ll give you tidbits.

When I reread this interview it made me remember how Johno is part of a generation of people who, as behind-the-scenes and in-crowd as they may have been, pretty much created everything we take for granted around us. Being hip was not something that was for sale, and an interesting taste in music or art was not just a few mouse-clicks away. I don’t want to come off like a sourpuss, but there is something to say for “taste” not being so democratic.

The interview actually starts with a completely hilarious timeline Johno wrote himself, spanning from birth,
12 March 1951,
via the seventies:
1972-1973: Becomes a hippie in a commune. Wears caftans and dabbles briefly with vegetarianism,
to the eighties,
1984: Fabulosity quotient secured, his name is on every downtown guest list. Select does great and large-format magazine The Manipulator is launched. Continues with Bartsch to promote avant-garde fashion in New York and Tokyo. Makes Chelsea gay by moving into a space on West 18th Street,
and the nineties,
1996-1999: The Century Hotel is sold. Travels to Cape Town to do a city profile for Select and everything falls into place. Johno and twin decide: “Capetown is where we’ll die,”
up to the time of the interview. The above examples are just a couple of the dates that we listed in the print interview.

TG: By 1984 the boy from South Africa had become a super-cool New Yorker, smack in the middle of everything hip and happening. New York was at the beginning of its post-disco heyday, a lot of stuff going on: Chelsea and body culture were coming up, a new club vibe, people were getting into design, matte black, sushi, and so on. There must have been a huge sense of excitement…
JdP: Well, yes, by the late ‘80’s anyway, there was this “new thing” happening in New York with house music and XTC and new fashions for new bodies, and travel-for-all, and a whole host of design sensibilities promulgated by life-style magazines and a burgeoning cult of celebrity, that were becoming common fodder for the common man. Up until then, the state of being fabulous was a condition reserved only for the stylish few who were “in-the-know”. An augury of the ubiquitous fabulosity that now pervades everything in a modern, neo-millennial life, I suppose. So yes, it was fun-creating it as it were—but the results, now fifteen, twenty years later, are all rather dreary. Housewives in haute couture, Gucci boutiques in Las Vegas, reality TV turning dingbats into heroes, all corners of the Earth brimming with tourists, and tastefulness for sale. I once read of a teacher who told her star student that “if the tragedy of the world is not the evil wrought by the good, I’ll eat my hat!” I tend to agree.

TG: In all the years that I’ve known you, and obviously before that as well, you’ve never had a real home. While I and your other friends were showing off their fabulous new arrangements of mid-century furniture finds, you were living in Century Hotel rooms, places of friends who weren’t around, or in your apartment-slash-offices in Chelsea. How is it to have a proper house now? A sigh of relief?
JdP: Totally. Although it’s about more than simply having a home; it’s about having a home at the right time. There’s a W. Somerset Maugham quote about the point of life, if any, being that one makes a good shape of it “with its beginning, its middle and its end.”
Until I was 45, my life was lived out and about, on the streets and in the restaurants, clubs and bars of the world. Who needs fancy furniture and lovely lamps to support that kind of lifestyle? My expendable income was spent on decorating myself, not my bloody walls. But now life is no longer lived out and about, but rather in and sedentary. And so my environment is nurtured while my wardrobe collapses. Just as it should be. Preserve me from becoming some silly old fart who perpetually invests in bolstering his aging façade. What we call in our sententious ways—and à propos the very subject: “decorating the lobby while the house is burning down.”

Now, if you feel like reading the whole interview—and I can’t blame you because Johno is so smart and funny—just find BUTT issue # 5, from 2002 on eBay. Unfortunately Johno is not inclined to write an autobiography, because, he explains “We all secretly snigger at the fatuousness of something like a Patsy Kensit or Mary McFadden or Francesco Scavullo memoir…God forbid there should be one from little ol’ moi too!” I just hope he changes his mind.

Links:

This >link< goes to Johno’s own site, on which he has a great little version of the timeline he wrote for our interview. But his is a little more family-friendly.

Johno founded a company upon his return to Cape Town, for which he is the principal designer. His cowhide rugs, ottomans, headboards and what have you, have won the South African ELLE Decoration Design Award twice. Check it out >here<

Here’s a >link< to another BUTT interview I did. It’s with Stephen Galloway, for issue # 9, 2004.

(Aren’t gifts always free?)

This is by no means a stab at digital technology, because I definitely benefit from it way too much to even try to imagine daily life without a computer.

BUT (and this is a big “but”), I never, ever lose sight of the fact that all the work that inspires me most has been created manually. So it is hardly a coincidence that my own work is manual (click here to see how I channel my own manual OCD-impulses), and that I embrace imperfection in my own work and in that of others.
Sure, it was cute-slash-interesting to learn that David Hockney is embracing the wonders of the Adobe Creative Suite (see NYT 10-18-2008), but the man is a wise and experienced artist, and can do nothing wrong at this point. And I completely understand how convenient it all is, and how it can speed up the sketching phase, or a lay-out, and I know first hand how using photoshop can prevent wasting days of trying stuff by hand. And that’s great…

But having said all that, there is nothing like the human touch, revealing the human mind at work. Would you be able to stare at, and meditate on a small Ellsworth Kelly or a Myron Stout for an hour if it had been made in photoshop and was spit out by a printer? No? Exactly, I didn’t think so. When the hand executes a decision that was wordlessly made by the creative brain, magic can happen. When it is executed by a computer program, not so much.

So consider this my manifesto for 2010: More silk screens made by hand, photo shoots with laughably low production values (if any), face to face interviews, more glue, exacto knifes, torn paper, 50 collages gone wrong that need to be tossed, in order to have 3 good ones.

An on that note, made by hand, and pure as freshly fallen January snow, please find examples of what I’m talking about:

A 1957 plaster showcase of Clarendon, by Elaine Lustig, (yes, I’m beginning to sound like one of those Lustig-fanatics I wrote about here). I could look at this for hours, which probably reveals too much about A) my mental health and B) my productivity level.

A 1959 paper cut piece by Ernst Röttger, all you’re looking at is an idea, oh excuse me, I mean “concept”, a piece of white paper and the work of two hands and an exacto knife.

And finally, two 1965 pieces by Giovanni Pintori, the genius behind Olivetti’s identity. I love how the curve to the left on the J brings it a little too close to the I too fast. That is the kind of imperfection that gets me off. And if you can achieve that on the computer, congratulations!

Some morning, a while ago, I was walking my dog and minding my own business in the West Village. It was garbage day. When my dog stopped me in my tracks, because something urgently needed sniffing at, I noticed a neat pile of old magazines, with a string around it, present-style. And a gift it was; it turned out to be a pile of L’oeil magazines from 1959-1960, in great condition.
I couldn’t get over the beauty: the uncoated paper, the sophisticated covers, the full color lithos inside, the ads for Balmain (him again), Knoll, and the Daniel Cordier Gallery on the back covers, every font, every subject…flawless.

Flash forward to recently: I was once again getting lost in a serious book-vortex in my partner’s vast library of highly covetable and rare books on design, interiors and art—which, by the way, I spend way too much time doing, but how can one resist?— Anyway, I noticed that two books of his that I love, European Decoration and The Best In European Decoration (1963), both published by Reynal & Co., turned out to be collections of interiors featured in L’oeil.
Each project in the books gets its own type treatment (don’t you love it when designers felt free to be all non-commercial and weird in their approach?), and the European interiors range from super pop villas to medieval castles. Very much like World of Interiors is doing so nicely today.

The takeway of this story: if you’re a font dork and a 1960’s interiors nerd, and you can get your hands on either the magazine or the books, buy them.

In what feels like 600 years ago, but really was the early 00’s, Simon Doonan virtually gave me carte blanche to create window- and in-store installations at the Beverly Hills location of Barneys New York.
This was after I followed in the amazing footsteps of Jean Philippe Delhomme and Liselotte Watkins (Hi Liselotte!), and had done several newsprint ad campaigns for Barneys, collateral for the cosmetics department, and their first ever website illustrations. The weirdest thing I ever did for Barneys New York was create a custom gift voucher for Herb Ritts’ mom, worth an amount I will not disclose.

Anyway, for the window I used old dress forms and pieces from a beautiful Yohji Yamamoto collection of burlap and linen.
I crammed the window with big canvases and framed works on paper (by moi, duh), and extended the situation directly on the glass.
Because there’s nothing like a garish splash of color to attract the attention of drivers at night (at that location you don’t really consider pedestrian window shoppers), I went for a bright green and lilac combo. Now I’d probably go for more of a Wonder Bread palette, but that may just be a current fixation.

The images leave a lot to be desired, but you get the idea…

For the men’s floor I created an installation meant to look like art gallery visitors looking at floating framed works on paper. Additionally I suspended large unframed works on paper along a length of 15 or 20 feet, with more mannequin gallery people contemplating the work. This “room divider” separated the Helmut Lang area from the Jean Paul Gaultier section. Or the Costume Nationale mini-boutique from the Margiela racks. Or something from something. My memory fails me here, but again, you get the idea. Sadly no images of that part.

There are some serious Elaine Lustig Cohen freaks out there, who try to collect every Meridian cover she did. Which I won’t do, but I totally understand the inclination. Lustig Cohen (b. 1927) designed truly beautiful covers for the house, whose publisher, Arthur A. Cohen, she married in the fifties.

I won’t get in to any bio details, because Ellen Lupton wrote a great profile, which you can read here. (Though Lupton does state something I strongly have to disagree with: she says that Lustig’s covers “bring to mind the recent work of Chip Kidd”. I have yet to see anything by Chip Kidd that I like, and his overwrought 90’s style is the last thing I think of when I look at Lustig’s joyful minimalism.)
More delicious Lustig-ness:

I may not have any of the above, but I do have “Sign Language” from 1961. This hardcover about signage “for buildings and landscape”, was designed inside and out by Lustig, and it is so nice to see her modernist mind at work in the interior lay-outs.
I’ll let the images speak for themselves.

Even though this style has had some moments over the last decade, and probably needs slip into an induced coma before it gets spoiled forever, I couldn’t resist this one. It’s an ad for a boutique in Century City, by Frazier/Hauge & Associates, 1967.

The copy (in all caps) is kind of hilarious:
THERE IS A SPECIAL KIND OF FEMALE…SHE IS A CONSTANT CHANGE…FROM PUSSY CAT TO PANTHER…SHE IS ALWAYS NOTICED BECAUSE OF HER OWN SPECIAL KIND OF CHIC…ALWAYS A FEW STEPS AHEAD OF HER CONTEMPORARIES…SHE IS DARING, SUPER AND WONDERFUL…SHE HAS FASHION ARROGANCE…SHE KNOCKS ABOUT IN RUDI GERNREICH, ANNE KLEIN, GEIST & GEIST…THE “WHO’S WHO” OF AVANT-GARDE FASHIONS…COUNTRY CLUB FASHIONS IS HER STORE.

I was doing some research on monochromatic still life images (don’t ask) and came across this GT&E campaign from better looking times, AKA the early 60’s. The copy almost whispers, and the photography doesn’t exactly yell at you either. In other words, it’s a campaign designed for adults. What a novel concept that would be today.

I threw in an ad for Bell and one for AT&T from the same period, both equally smart.

This may actually be my favorite: even though it’s a cat-lady. Or maybe because it is a cat-lady.