Bulb Magazine

urban gardening reinvented premiere issue | summer 2014

The High Line Above ground railroad turned park comes to a completion.

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Owner & Founder Lara Hedberg Deam

Editor-in-Chief Allison Arieff President & Publisher Michela O’Connor Abrams

e d ito rial 99 Osgood Place San Francisco, CA 94133 (415) 743–9990 letters@bulbmag.com

National Distribution Warner Publisher Services

Creative Director · Claudia Bruno Managing Editor · Ann Wilson Spradlin Senior Editors · Andrew Wagner, Sam Grawe Editor-at Large · Virginia Gardiner Editor · Amara Holstein Associate Editor · Amber Bravo Assistant Managing Editor · Carleigh Bell Copy Editor · Rachel Fudge Fact Checkers · Madeline Kerr, Hon Walker, Megan Mansell Williams Editorial Intern · Christopher Bright

d e s ig n Senior Designer · Brendan Callahan Design Production · Manager Kathryn Hansen Designer · Emily CM Anderson Marketing Art Director · Gayle Chin Photo Editor · Kate Stone Associate Photo Editor · Aya Brackett Contributing Photo Editor · Deborah Kozloff Hearey

p ro d u c tio n Senior Production Director · Fran Fox Production Specialist · Bill Lyons Production Coordinator · Joy Pascual Operations Director · Romi Jacques Accounting Manager · Wanda Smith Consumer Marketing Director · Laura Simkins Subscriptions Manager · Brian Karo Newsstand Consultant · George Clark

m arke tin g About the Cover The High Line in NYC. Photographed by Joel Raskin

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Partner Marketing Director · Celine Bleu Events Manager · Sita Bhaumik Marketing Coordinator · Elizabeth Heinrich Marketing Intern · Kathy Chandler Advertising Operations Coordinator · Fida Sleiman

a dve r t i s i n g Bulb Advertising Offices · New York 1 (212) 383–2010 International Sales Director W. Keven Weeks » keven@bulbmag.com Eastern Regional Manager Kathryn McKeeeer » kathryn@bulbmag.com New England · Canada Sales Manager Wayne Carrington » wayne@bulbmag.com Sales Coordinator Joanne Lucano » joanne@bulbmag.com west coast Barbara Bella & Associates Danny Della Lana · San Francisco 1 (415) 986–7762 » danny@bbasf.com James Wood · Los Angeles 1 (323) 467–5906 » woods@bba-la.com midwest Derr Media Group, Timothy J. Derr 1 (847) 615–1921 » derrmediagroup@comcast.net Karen Teegarden & Associates, Diane MacLean 1 (248) 642–1773 » diane@kteegarden.com southwest Nuala Berrells Media, Nuala Berrells 1 (214) 660–9713 » nuala@sbcglobal.net Andy Clifton 1 (706) 369–7320 » clifton@fccmedia.com Article Reprints FosteReprints Donna Bushore 1 (866) 879–9144, x156 dbushore@fostereprints.com Type is set in Whitney, Clarendon, and Mrs. Eaves. Printed with Blurb.

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Content

prem iere iss ue | summer 20 14

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depar tmentals 8 11 12 14 32

letter from the editor plants products places plates

features

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the high line

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office space

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field of greens

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urban edens

The industrial NYC park is completed, ending on the Hudson River » Anne Raver Designer Phillipe Malouin of Post-Office transformed what was once a doctor’s office into online design magazine Dezeen’s North London headquarters » Christine Chang Hanway Farmers markets have taken root across the nation in big cities. » Martha Teichner Sixty-six square feet is certainly bigger than a window box, but it is, perhaps, smaller than some fire escapes. » Penelope Green

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Top Picks My favorite things lately

from the

Editor

Diva water can, Modern housewares manufacturer Alessi teamed up with Finnish designer Eero Aarnio to create the Diva, a curvaceous green, black, or white watering can that looks as good as it is handy. $51 – lumens.com

Welcome to the premiere issue of Bulb Magazine. Just to explain a little background as to how this magazine came to be, I have grown up in New York City my whole life, and while I love the fast-paced lifestyle, my favorite part of New York City is Central Park. I love the diversity and size of the park that unites Manhattan. Combining my love of gardening and the city, I created this magazine with the intention of providing city dwellers a resource that they can draw inspiration, ideas, and become educated on dealing with plant life while living in an urban environment.

Going back to this idea of Form, I came up with the name Bulb Magazine by thinking of a form that relates to green life. Not only does a bulb refer to the vocabulary term for a the root of a plant, but it is also an idea. A form in which you can’t physically grasp, but a light bulb goes off in your head and that brilliant idea comes to you.

Our goal here at Bulb Magazine is to instill that light bulb in yourself. To give you ideas about how you can solve problems and make decisions regarding your urban garden whether that be indoor plants, a rooftop garden, or any other way in between where you introduce greenery into your urban life.

Skin stick by earth tu face, an all-purpose skin salve for face, lips, and body. Ingredients include organic rose geranium, vetiver, pure beeswax, lavender, and patchouli. Comes packaged in a 100% compostable tube. $34 – earthtuface.com

Edyn, the smart garden stake analyzes pH levels, humidity, and light intensity, then factors in local meterogicial readings as it instructs the water valve to hydrate plants as needed. $159 – edyn.com

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photographer: emily stevens

Amanda Cooper editor-in-chief

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plants

succulents // Lithops by desmond cole photo by aliki alisa

origin: Lithops is a genus of succulent plants in the

treatment: Lithops are popular novelty house plants

ice plant family, Aizoaceae. Members of the genus are native to southern Africa. The name is derived from the Ancient Greek words lithos, meaning “stone,” and ops, meaning “face,” referring to the stone-like appearance of the plants. They avoid being eaten by blending in with surrounding rocks and are often known as pebble plants or living stones.

and many specialist succulent growers maintain collections. They are relatively easy to grow if given sufficient sun and a suitable well drained-soil.

Normal treatment in mild temperate climates is to keep them dry during winter, watering only when the old leaves have dried up and been replaced by a new leaf pair. Watering continues through autumn when the plants flower and then stopped for winter. The best results are obtained with additional heat such as a greenhouse. In hotter climates Lithops will have a summer dormancy when they should be kept mostly dry, and they may require some water in winter. In tropical climates, Lithops can be grown primarily in winter with a long summer dormancy. In all conditions, Lithops will be the most active and the need most water during autumn and each species will flower at approximately the same time.

description: Individual Lithops plants consist of one or more pairs of bulbous, almost fused leaves opposite to each other and hardly any stem. The slit between the leaves contains the meristem and produces flowers and new leaves. The leaves of Lithops are mostly buried below the surface of the soil, with a partially or completely translucent top surface known as a leaf window, which allows light to enter the interior of the leaves for photosynthesis. There is a variety of different Lithops.

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products

New Additions Potted plants delivered to your door! by olivia martin photos by the sill

Hyde Collection, $175

Top: Jules in Gloss White, $48 Bottom: Jules in Sonora, $48

The Sill, dedicated to providing houseplants and plant consultation services, would be easy to mock if their plants and pots weren’t so attractive. Plus, options to handwrite messages and deliver as gifts make this a more sustainable option over delivering bouquets. With clients like Kate Spade Saturday, Vine, Warby Parker, and Twitter, The Sill is au courant, if limited to New Yorkers only.

Each plant design is carefully thought out and crafted. For example, the triangular plant boxes were inspired by and named after famed French plant hunter Jules Cardot. Monsieur Cardot explored the far reaches of both Alaska and Antarctica in search of tiny plants. Ultimately he found what he was looking for, along with fame and fortune.

You are probably aware that eating plants is good for you. However, what you may not know is that plants can provide benefits even if your taste buds run for cover at the

first mention of spinach. New research is beginning to show that just having plants in your workspace may improve how you think. In a study to be published in the Journal of Environmental Psychology, researchers show that the presence of plants in an office setting boosts one’s ability to maintain attention. As humans spend more of their lives in front of screens, scientists have devoted more attention to the effects these artificial environments have on the mind. Sometimes, this new study suggests, it may be possible to reap benefits with simple changes in decorating strategy.

Regardless, it seems clear that the presence of plants in the workspace led to direct benefits for mental functioning and awareness. So, even if you have never been one to make your mom happy by eating your vegetables, it seems that you can still take advantage of the beneficial effects of leafy greens. summer 2014 |

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products

clockwise from left: Black Mesa Collection, $225 Spring Collection, $78 Fiddle Leaf Fig Tree, $250

Party prep with a batch of bright colored cacti

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places

AMA Z I NG

Green Walls

by kelsey keith

Not for the feint of heart, but for the green of thumb: A living wall is a vibrant way to celebrate nature in tandem with architecture.

Concrete Planter Stacked concrete forms, developed by architects David Barragán and Jose Maria Sáez and used as planters along the front facade, offer privacy and integrate with the building in Quito, Ecuador.

Photo by Joao Canziani

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East Village Aparment The garden wall in Pulltab’s East Village apartment renovation frames the client’s breakfast area and walnut-paneled study. Integral to the indoor green wall design is a low water trough under the garden wall, which collects runoff from the wall’s irrigation system.

Photo by Eric Piasecki

Photo by Elizabeth Felicella

Woltz Vertical Garden Nelson Byrd Woltz's vertical garden in New York creates a nest for its human and avian inhabitants.

The perennial plants on the green wall were plotted out as a piece of verdant abstract art, and edibles, like strawberry, thyme, and rosemary, are planted within children’s reach.

Bay Meadow Welcome Center At 86 feet long the vertical garden at Bay Meadow’s Welcome Center is one of the largest vertical gardens in the bay area.

Photo by Erin Peterson

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places

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Urban Play Garden Far from pandering to the whine of youth, this urban play garden fosters thoughtful interaction in a protected setting within the bustle of San Francisco. Concrete slopes are hemmed in by vertical garden walls.

Photo by Marian Brenner

West Side Co–op In this architect's Upper West Side co–op, the Zizmors' son plays in front of a living wall created by urban landscaper Kari Elwell Katzander of Mingo Design.

Photo by Roland Bello

Dimanche Family Room Botanist Patric Blanc designed this Paris aerie for the Dimanche family. Their indoor garden wall is 20 x 23 feet, dominating the living room in the best possible way.

Photo by Jessica Antola

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The High

LINE by anne raver photos by iwan baan

of

ing Ra n pe the O ic e at r sto Lin i H gh e i h T eH Th

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ds r a il Y

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he third and final section of the High Line will officially opened to the public on September 21, 2014 at 11 A.M., marking the final chapter of a 15-year journey to transform a once abandoned rail road track into an elevated park for the city. The new section has been christened ‘High Line at the Railyards‘ and follows the original train tracks from 30th to 34th St. to the north and south, and from 10th to 12th Ave east and west, exposing High Line–goers to expansive and unobstructed views of the Hudson River and New Jersey. Unlike the two sections that preceded it, the path that makes up The Railyards is far less manicured. With its organized but “wild” greenery, the design of this final leg instead asks visitors to contemplate the railway’s past and the surrounding landscape as it stands and as it will change with the introduction of Hudson Yards. The design of the High Line is the work of landscape architect James Corner, Diller Scofidio + Renfro, and Dutch garden designer Piet Oudolf.

Fabrications, an ambitious, three–venue exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, aims to use installation to draw a diverse audience into a serious, immediate encounter with contemporary architecture. Organized by the three museums’ curators of architecture—Aaron Betsky, Mark Robbins, and Terence Riley, respectively—the show presents twelve installations (four at each venue) that, according to its press materials, “offer an immediate experience of architecture while revealing and addressing ideas about current architectural production, new materials, and making space.” Many of the pieces provide opportunities for direct physical contact; among the twelve projects you’re invited to sit, climb, hide, lay down, pull, and gently drop (while bemused museum guards do their best to remain impassive). Most also strive for immediacy by exposing or exaggerating their tectonic gestures, acting as a kind of large-print version for those not accustomed to reading architecture closely.

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But if the installations get the “immediate” experience right, they’re not all as successful at dealing with the capacity of architecture to mediate: fewer than half of the projects present themselves as devices for reinterpreting and rearranging architectural space. It’s hard to know why this is; maybe it’s because most of the architects in the show are more used to building big than thinking about museum installation. But why fabricate an interesting architectural object for a show without also making an interesting claim about its setting, about the institutional and spatial conditions of its display?

Across the three venues–the sculpture garden at the museum and the galleries of the Wexner–three basic strategies are used to make the installations “immediate”; they

glass bottles, and other materials drawn from the vernacular architecture of the rural South; the structure will be attached to a home in Alabama after the exhibition ends.

Given that Coker Architects interest in reusing their objects elsewhere, it’s not surprising that the installations remain aloof from the museum.

The Somatic Body, Kennedy & Violich Architecture’s installation at the museum (where each of the show’s architects worked on each of its pieces at a different stage; the architect or firm that produced final working drawings for a piece is identified here as its author), presents a wall in the process of delamination and eruption, a tumbling swell of gypsum board, plywood, lath, and wire. Positioned near the entry, it has an interesting annunciatory presence

limp-looking forms were originally meant to be climbed so people could reach viewing platforms some 20 feet above the gallery, but institutional anxieties prevailed, and the hands-on elements (treads and rails) are vestigial. Still, the piece has an undeniably exciting presence and carries muscle enough to confront the idiosyncratic spaces and ornamental structure of Peter Eisenman’s architecture.

Two museum installations practically insist on physical interaction, but don’t go far enough in uncovering what Betsky, in his curatorial statement, rightly calls the museum’s “protective skin”–the ways it relies on its apparent physical “neutrality” (white walls, silence, concealed building and security systems, and so on) to veil its own interpretive practices and modes

“It’s notWILDat all,

it’s an introduction to theWILD” might be called mimetic, interactive, and interventionist approaches, and the projects divide up neatly into four per category. The mimetic works present small if nonetheless full-scale buildings or building parts that take a fairly uncritical stance to the constraints of museum display.

Patkau Architects’ Petite Maison de Weekend, revisited, at the beautifully installed the site, is a complete wooden cottage for two. Well crafted, if didactic in its demonstration of “sustainable” construction, it presents such features as a deep storage wall, photovoltaic roof, composting toilet, and rain-collection system; after the exhibition, the construction is meant to be relocated and to serve as a prototype for other such houses. Coker Architects followed a similar strategy, also at the Wexner: the firm built a passageway–cum–porch of different types of woods, cables, window screen, cast concrete, tree stumps, blue

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but misses the chance to reorganize passage into the gallery; worse, the pseudosculptural stacks of drywall end up offering a banal display of commonly used building materials that is seen everyday.

Munkenbeck and Marshall Architects built a structure that recalls Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona pavilion above the garden’s reflecting pool. In a setting so infused with the spirit of Mies (the garden was designed, after the master, by Philip Johnson), this little hut intelligently and ironically captures his aesthetic in condensed form, and brings an intimate architectural scale into the garden, but otherwise doesn’t do much apart from showcasing two gorgeous hanging panels of woven steel.

The four interactive installations focus on the demonstration of physical forces.

With Dancing Bleachers, Eric Owen Moss draped wishbone-like pieces of steel over the Wexner Center’s beams; these gigantic,

of spatial control. The Body in Action, by Hodgetts and Fung Design Associates, gathers air from the museum’s ventilation system into an enormous sailcloth “lung” that feeds into a bowed wooden mouthpiece; handles invite visitors to open the mouth and feel the rush of air. The Body in Equipoise, by Rob Wellington Quigley, is a kind of gangplank made of wood, cables, pink stretch wrap, bungee cord, steel tubes, and other materials; as people walk along its surface, they reach a point where their weight causes the floor to slightly drop.

Both pieces subvert our expectations of architectural surfaces, but fail to get at the political dimension that Betsky suggests.

At museum, Ten Arquitectos with Guy Nordenson removed a portion of the venerable garden’s marble paving and inserted a wooden ramp assembly in the rubble facing Auguste Rodin’s Monument to Balzac.

Visitors sit in a chair, and look up to a lean,

The new expansion, High Line at The Railyards opens up to the pedestrians.

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far right: Seating Along the Interim Walkway, Near West 33rd Street and 12th Avenue. right: Detail Shot of One of the Three Rail Track Walks at the High Line at the Rail Yards bottom: The Grove Section of the High Line.

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cantilevered glass canopy inscribed with an unidentified fragment of art historical writing. The reference is so obscure, and its presentation so indirect, that you can’t tell if it has been invoked ironically, respectfully, or gratuitously; meanwhile, the power and immediacy of the excavation gets undermined.

It is the four installations that pose genuinely interesting arguments about conditions of architectural exhibition and museum display along with more “immediate” aspects of construction and experience. At the museum, Office erected a stair-like structure of perforated, folded sheet steel that leaps, from stiletto feet, beyond the garden’s northern wall, suggesting the interpenetration of museum garden and urban fabric. Despite the fact that it risks misreading as a none-too-handsome sculpture, it nonetheless makes a very strong urban gesture, both within the garden especially when seen from 54th Street.

Along part of the glass curtain wall on the opposite side of the garden, Smith-Miller and Hawkinson constructed a quiet but pointed critique of the wall’s way of framing and separating garden and museum. Among other elements, a folded plane of plywood steps up from the garden floor, meets the glass, and then continues inside, effectively bringing the outdoors in. Also outside, a large black panel attached to steel columns blocks the garden view and reinforces the windows’ mirror effect. Reflected images and abstract forms crisscross the glass boundary, entangling viewer and viewed in a nuanced spectral play.

The other interventionist projects introduce new programs, and both would make welcome permanent museum installations. At the Wexner, Stanley Saitowitz intensified a rather bland space that has

been used as an informal seating area and passageway with Virtual Reading Room, a lovely ensemble of clear acrylic benches, reading lecterns, shelves, and horizontal planes suspended from cables. The work not only adds architectural definition with subtle optical and acoustic effects, but offers people the chance to sit and read—a rare accommodation in museum galleries.

With The Body in Repose, Kuth Ranieri replaced a perimeter wall at museum with a sexy new skin; its layers of industrial felt have been clamped, clipped, tattooed, and cut to make little invaginated nooks at the edge of the gallery where you can sit or lie down.

From this wonderful position of interior exteriority—you are simultaneously inside and outside the gallery, suspended in a layer of interstitial space—other things become apparent: the messy innards of the building wall, the fact that people usually stand in museums, and the enormous potential of the gallery wall freed from the institutional imperatives of the smooth white plane.

To the extent that Fabrications can legitimize and promote installation as a form of architectural practice, it marks a significant moment in the development of contemporary architecture. The show demonstrates a broad range of innovative formal strategies and materials while, at its best, showing us—even the novices among us—something of how architecture can change our relationship to the world. Despite the uneven results of the first experiment, an ongoing, periodic forum conceived along these lines could move inventive architectural thinking beyond the design community to a broader, influential, and potentially interested public. As a model for future events, then, Fabrications promises something great: a chance for contemporary architecture to reveal– and stretch–itself. summer 2014 |

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Office S PAC E A renovation of an old doctor's office gives this designer's office a green look

by christine chang hanway photos by luke hayes

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veryone loves an architecture show about houses because all that is required of someone looking at a house is, as Gaston Bachelard writes in The Poetics of Space, “the ability to transcend our memories of all the houses in which we have found shelter [and] all the houses we have dreamed we live in” — beginning, of course, with the house we first lived in. Although visitors may appreciate the solo exhibition of a major architect, they are not usually as intimately involved in the thought processes behind the design of a concert hall, for example, and are likely to give up on reading detailed drawings. But presented with the plan of a house, people immediately walk through it in their imaginations. And architects’ models of houses spark, as dollhouses do, a level of fantasy that makes it possible to experience the physical sensation of being in a new and yet familiar space.

Also, house exhibitions are more about the future than they are about the past. When Barbara Jakobson (using the name B.J. Archer) staged “Houses for Sale” at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York in 1980, she invited eight international architects to design private dwellings, showing the form to be fertile ground for architectural invention — “a geometric object of balanced voids and solids to be analyzed rationally,” as she wrote in the catalogue. Isozaki’s House of Nine Squares foretold his Palladian classicism, and Emilio Ambasz’s Arcadian Berm House spoke of that architect’s concern for the environment and interest in solar energy.

In 1985, the winning designs on view at the Boston Architectural Center, from a Minneapolis College of Art and Design competition called “A New American House,” dealt with community life and the need for cluster housing that could provide work spaces at home as well as child care. These houses, with backyards and gabled roofs, lent an aura of traditional reassurance to new social trends.

This year, with “The Un-Private House,” the Museum of Modern Art is displaying 26 houses designed since 1988 — all but six of which have been or are being built. The show deals with new social patterns that call for fresh architectural solutions, in particular ones that combine working spaces with living spaces and that find a place

For his window collage, Malouin bought most of the Victorian windows on eBay; a great deal of research was required to find windows the right size.

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for the virtual world in the home. Like a computer, the contemporary house concentrates, according to the museum, on transmitting signals to the outside world at the cost of intimacy and privacy.

Also, in a reversal of the norms of the “family room” era, children are frequently banished to separate quarters, and clients are just as likely to live alone or in same-sex relationships as in traditional nuclear families. Terence Riley, who organized the show as chief curator of the museum’s department of architecture and design, poses the main question in his catalogue essay: “If the private house no longer has a domestic character, what sort of character will it have?”

The answers come from a diverse group of architects, some better known than others, representing Europe, South America, Japan and parts of Asia, and the United States. One curious aspect of the exhibition design is the selection of the old–fashioned William Morris Larkspur pattern as the wallpaper backdrop for the show’s large-format photographs and drawings. The Arts and

The windows in the roof reminded Malouin of a greenhouse.

Filling the room with plants creates an outdoor feeling.

Crafts movement as defined by Morris took inspiration from a romanticized past — but perhaps the contrast is the point. The wallpaper does suit the heavy worktables, beds, bookshelves, and other comfortable objects provided by the Furniture Co. that serve as ready–made pedestals for the models and that give a workmanlike quality to the galleries, as if these rooms were part of an architect’s studio and home combined.

On the whole, the houses and loft apartments on view are anything but cozy. Rather, the architects are committed to design whose appeal lies in its response to and integration of advanced technologies and new materials. Sleekness here runs more than skin deep. After years of the decorative pastiche associated with Post-Modernism, it came as both a surprise and a relief that the reigning influence in this exhibition was Mies van der Rohe and, in particular, the Farnsworth House, which the architect designed summer 2014 |

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some 50 years ago in Plano, Illinois, as a weekend retreat for his close friend, Dr. Edith Farnsworth. A glass box with a flat roof and evenly spaced structural steel I-beams painted white, the house dematerializes at night (even with the draperies closed) into a cube of light. There have been many copies since, but the architects in the museum show are creating radical variations on the theme, skewing the form by selecting and developing only certain aspects of Mies’s design to advance new ideas about the configuration of rooms and the requirements of the electronic age.

Two houses in Tokyo by Japanese architects are among the most exciting. On one of Tokyo’s eclectic and densely packed streets, Shigeru Ban’s Curtain Wall House juts out on a corner like a billboard for Modernism. In reversing the fundamental order — by hanging glass inside and curtains outside — the architect explores the formal possibilities offered by the traditional Japanese shoji-screen house, where translucency is valued over transparency. The glass sits in sliding panels and retracts into corners of the house, and once drawn, the sailcloth curtain (besides making an obvious but witty allusion to non-load-bearing walls) provides shade during the day and privacy at night.

More in keeping with Mies’s courtyard houses, the M House by Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa is separated from its residential street by a wall of perforated metal, behind which translucent polycarbonate windows filter light into a two-story central courtyard that is sunk, along with the dining, work, and living areas, below ground level. This courtyard and two other light courts are open to the sky, so that in passing through them, one is exposed to the weather as in a traditional Japanese house. The rectangular rooms, upstairs and down, run between the light courts in a configuration that limits privacy within the house — although the streetscape is effectively screened out.

Now under construction in Napa Valley, California, the Kramlich Residence and Media Collection, designed by Herzog & de Meuron, features an angular, flat-roofed Miesian glass pavilion over a series of subterranean galleries, including one in an underground garage, for the couple’s collection of electronic art. Even the curved inner

walls of the pavilion function as screens for video, films, and digital art, which compete with the view of nature beyond the structure’s glass walls. In the same vein, Diller + Scofidio’s half-crescentshaped Slow House, an unbuilt project for a site on Long Island, features a video camera that records the view through the house’s immense atelier-style picture window and allows for instant replay on a monitor inside. And the main walls of Hariri & Hariri’s project for a Digital House feature liquid-crystal displays that allow for videoconferencing with virtual guests in the living room and cooking lessons from a televised chef in the kitchen.

Two row houses on Borneo Sporenburg in Amsterdam by MVRDV, meanwhile, play with transparency and opacity on a large scale: one presents a glass facade to the street, behind which most of its rooms are boxed off by inner walls; the other hides behind a traditional masonry facade but reveals much of its interior through a glass wall running along one side. (The pattern of boxed-off and exposed rooms recalls the vertical grid of Rietveld’s Schröder House in Utrecht, a model of which is conveniently on view, along with one of Mies’s Tugendhat House, in the top-floor architecture galleries.)

Whether Riley has proved his theory about the loss of privacy is questionable. Despite the intrusions of the outside world through glass walls and electronic hookups, people still retain the option of turning off their computers or otherwise retreating — and many of the architects represented in the show have proven adept at helping them do just that. Perhaps it is the incursion of professional work spaces into private homes and the concomitant loss of the “study” as an arena for contemplation (Riley calls it a nineteenth-century room) that is more indicative of the loss of privacy. But even some of the houses in the show offer this kind of refuge: The T House by Simon Ungers with Thomas Kinslow, for example, has a separate library tower of weathering-steel plates that can fit 10,000 books as well as a reading area. And there is also Rem Koolhaas’s Maison à Bor-deaux, where the wheelchair-bound owner can sit at his desk on an open elevator platform while it moves along a three-story wall of bookshelves — an expanded notion of the study, perhaps, but still a solitary place to think and to dream.

“It made immediate sense to create a wall of glass as a barrier”

Post–Office founder Philippe Malouin and his team divided the waiting room with a patchwork of reclaimed windows, creating separate meeting and work spaces. Malouin found most of the victorian windows through eBay and pieced them together.

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plates

Vegetable Potato Salad recipe by chef joe goetze

ingredients 9 pounds Russet or Yukon Gold potatoes 6 loosely packed cups outer brussels sprouts leaves 2 cups sliced cauliflower flowerets 1 K cups thinly sliced celery 1 K cups 2-3 inch pieces asparagus spears 1 cup bread and butter pickle relish or chopped bread and butter pickles 1 K cups finely chopped flat leaf parsley 1 K cups finely chopped chives Kosher salt dressing 1 cup + 2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil 1 cup + 2 tablespoons red wine vinegar 1 K cups thinly sliced red onion 3 tablespoons minced garlic 2 tablespoons kosher salt 1 tablespoon granulated garlic O teaspoon white pepper

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preparation 1. Simmer the potatoes in salted water to cover until tender, about 15 minutes, depending on their size.

2. Meanwhile combine the dressing ingredients and let sit while the potatoes cook.

3. Drain the potatoes, and when cool enough to handle, but still warm, leaving the skins on, cut into K to O inch dice.

4. Gently toss with the vinaigrette and then fold in the remaining ingredients. Season to taste with salt.

5. The salad can be best served at this point or refrigerated, but best if served at room temperature immediately.

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