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Our Top Bridesmaid and Groomsmen gifts

10

Fantastic Florals The most popular florals of this season and tips on taking care of them

Cake Masters Five of this years most talented cake bakers fill us in on their secrets

The Checklist A calendar to help you check off everything before your big day

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Spring 2013

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HELLO READERS! For this Spring issue of Form Magazine, we've selected all of this Spring’s hottest up and coming bridal trends! Personally I think this is the best time for a wedding. In fact, the warm weather alone gets my tick of approval.

LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

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Also in this issue we have covered the biggest celebrity wedding of the season. I wanted this issue to present our future brides with lots of inspiration and fresh eye candy.

Cakes are HUGE this season, therefore we decided to take you behind the scenes with some of the biggest cake decorators of the year!

Thank you so much for supporting Form Magazine by reading this issue. If you like what you see please share it with others, in particular brides to be.

See you next issue!

LAUREN form / spring 2013 form / spring 2013

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in every issue LETTER FROM THE EDITOR a note from our editor abou tthis issue!

FORM ONLINE

take an inside look at our website!

IN THIS ISSUE

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CHECKLIST FOR THE BIG DAY a calendar to help you plan for everything you need to have covered on your big day

GOWN GUIDE

a guide on finding your perfect gown

28 54 form / spring 2013

departmentals

features

A POP OF COLOR

ONCE UPON A TIME

some of this season’s most popular wedding color schemes in action

an inside look at Blake Lively’s wedding

FANTASTIC FLORALS

CAKE MASTERS

HAPPY GIFTING

GOWNS GALORE

top bride and grooms gifts of 2013

a lookbook of all of this season’s hottest gowns

HELLO CINDERELLA

A SOUTHERN WEDDING

most popular flowers of this season and tips on taking care of them

five of this years most talented cake bakers fill us in on their secrets

shoes shoes, shoes! must we say more?

a wedding special full of charm

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FANTASTIC FLORALS Choosing your bouquet can be as easy as following these three simple steps

very important helpful tip

Written By: Hannah Garyl Photographs By: Margo Choy

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WHAT COLORS DO YOU WANT?

Most people see color before they notice the types of flowers and their arrangement, so picking shades first is paramount. A florist can help, but start assembling your palette on your own by following a few guidelines.

Decide which colors in your ceremony and reception locations you want to enhance or play down. If the walls are yellow, yellow blooms may fade into the background, causing the green stems to stand out.

Troll the paint aisle at the local hardware store and pick up free paint chips that appeal to you.

Consider the lighting you have to work with. At a day wedding, sunlight will flood the space, so pale colors may get washed out. At a dimly lit evening wedding, purple may appear gray in photographs. Try using warm colors (red, orange, yellow) in lowlight settings. Warm colors reflect light better while cool colors (blue, purple, green) recede into darkness.

Pick three colors to start; you can add more later. Looking to create drama?

Opt for contrast (like red and chartreuse green). Sequential colors (those next to one another in the rainbow) evoke a subtle sophistication. (you can, of course, go with a one-color palette, but in this case choose flowers with different textures to keep the arrangements from looking flat.)

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HOW WILL YOU DIVVY FUNDS?

When you’re allocating your budget, there are three pieces of the pie. In order or importance: Flowers for the reception. It’s smart to spend the most on these, as guests see them up close.

Flowers for the wedding party and immediate family. The bridal-party bouquets don’t play a big role at the reception, but they are heavily photographed, so don’t be tempted to cut too many corners. While having the bridal party carry, say, one longstemmed rose each may sound like a good idea, single buds look unwieldy in group photos, with stems sticking out in all directions.

By pooling your resources, you may be able to afford the kind of wedding you want. You also may not have to empty your savings account to get it.

What’s more, since everyone is contributing -- which means everyone gets a say -- you’re not likely to make one side or the other feel left out.

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WHAT IS YOUR WEDDING STYLE?

Certain colors and blooms evoke different levels of formality, partly depending on how they are arranged.

If you want a casual, carefree feel, a white phalaenopsis orchid will look like an overdressed dinner guest.

On the other end of the spectrum, a formal affair requires something more elegant than earthy yellow sunflowers.

When you meet with the florist, bring color chips, pictures of the venues, and images of flowers and wedding decorations that resonate with you so that he has a sense of your vision.

If you prefer to handle the flowers yourself, browse sites such as growersbox.com and flowerbud.com, which ship buds in bulk. Often these services offer table-ready arrangements too, so there’s no need to dethorn flowers, remove excess greenery, and–phew!– arrange it all on your own.

COSMOS

PEONY

AMARYLLIS

spring/summer

winter/spring

white, pink, red

white, pink, red, yellow, green

spring white, pink, red

A fairly fragile bloom– avoid if you’ll be outside in the heat for hours with no shade

Often associated with holidays, but a few cut blooms can look dramatic when clustered

An extremely popular pick, peonies can be pricey, but just a few still look fluffy and lush

IN THE DETAILS

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PHLOX

LISIANTHUS

ASTER

spring/summer

year round

purple, white, orange

white, pink, green, purple

white, pink, red

Some varieties of phlox release their scent at night–romantic for an evening ceremony

Use full stems that have several blooms, or cut off the flowers which look like roses

Perfect for Spring bouquets because, since they offer fresh colors that look seasonal

DAHLIA

DELPHINIUM

spring/summer

LILY

spring/fall

spring/summer

spring/summer

white, pink, red, orange, yellow

white, pink, blue, purple

white, pink, red

These big fluffy flowers are best in early spring and are sure to be a bright addition to any ceremony

Perfect grouped together for tall centerpieces. Or pluck off smaller blooms for a hair wreath

Your florist should remove the polen- dripping stamen in the middle of each bloom

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HAPPY GIFTING

Our top bridesmaid and groomsmens gifts for Spring 2013

Written By: Hannah Garyl Photographs By: Margo Choy

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BRIDESMAIDS

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OUR FAVORITES

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There’s no sweeter way to ask friends to be attendants than tucking notes inside ceramic macaron cookies from Site NYC. Arrange several on a plate, offering one to each pal, or hide them among their edible counterparts for a true surprise.

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Custom rubber stamps, each bearing a bridesmaid’s name in elegant script, let you -- and your attendants -- make a good impression.

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A video of your bridesmaids dancing at your bachelorette party or laughing at your bridal shower can be transformed into a keep-at-hand photo flip book for repeated enjoyment.

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3

Etch a set of tumblers with the bridesmaids’ names and a decorative motif, such as a ring of leaves. You can take them to a professional, or etch them yourself with etching solution sold at crafts stores.

5

Start with bars of white soap with flat sides and then create a custom graphic you can make into a decal.

Here, we used a Japanese motif to spice up the soap, but you could use a digital image of your choice that you design on your computer and then print on special decal paper.

GROOMSMEN

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Monogrammed suspenders are a great gift for groom to give to his best gents.

Hand-embroider initials using a basic chain stitch, or send suspenders out to a seamstress or department store for professional lettering.

2

Silk ties, rolled up, tagged with a personalized label, and secured with twine, were given to groomsmen as tokens of appreciation at this real wedding in Athens, Georgia.

3

Each of this groom’s four closest friends received flasks engraved with an inside joke from elementary school.

OUR FAVORITES

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4

Leila and Tony picked out neckwear in a mix of prints from Banana Republic and The Tie Bar and let each guy choose his favorite for their fall wedding in Wine Country. Here, they’re all displayed on a vintage wooden tie rack.

5

The groomsmen in this real wedding, along with the bride and groom’s dads, wore customized Vans given to them by the happy couple.

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ONCE UPON A TIME From glitter-dipped rose petals to gourmet smores and tartlets, Blake Lively and Ryan Reynold’s really went all out fortheir big day! Definitely one of the biggest weddings of the decade Written By: Lauren Chandler Photographs By: Jennifer Love

E

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.

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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 convenient child care. These houses, with backyards and gabled roofs, lent an aura of traditional reassurance to new social trends.

ONCE UPON A TIME

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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 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

“ From the heartfelt ceremony to the fun-filled carnival hour and elegant reception, it was a magical celebration.”

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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 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 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 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 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

ONCE UPON A TIME

49

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

metal, behind which translucent polycarbonate windows filter light into a twostory 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.

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“ The couple’s

desert table was filled with their favorite food but the focal point was their vanilla and sour cream wedding cake.”

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ry 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 Gerrit 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.)

Now under construction in Napa Valley, California, the Kramlich Residence and Media Collection, designed by Herzog & de Meuron, features an angular, flatroofed 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.

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.

ONCE UPON A TIME

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 mason-

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51

Five Pastry Geniuses, five unique and exquisite skill sets.

They wield their mixers, bags and brushes to make masterpieces that make jaws drop before a single fork is even lifted. Their work is a slice above.

By: Hannah Morrill Photographs By: Earl Canning

When architecture enters the realm of museum display, it generally arrives small, smooth, and flat. Drawings, photographs, computer images, video, and scale models are the usual media; however well they communicate information (and however beautiful they are), they can only approximate such phenomena as materiality, sound, and inhabitable space. For people not trained in the codes of architectural representation– most of the museum-going public–comprehension, too, tends to be approximate.

CAKE MASTERS

54

In the last 15 years or so, installation architecture has come to offer an alternative: the construction within a gallery of temporary, full-scale architecture that creates spaces, programs, and experiences. The best of this work not only occupies but also affects its surroundings, exposing something of the conventions of museum and gallery display and revealing latent possibilities of the space it inhabits.

“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 archi-

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tecture–Aaron Betsky, Mark Robbins, and Terence Riley, respectively–the show presents 12 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 12 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.

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?

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“There is nothing that excites me like getting to make beautiful things!”

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 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.

CAKE MASTERS

56

Patkau Architects’ Petite Maison de Weekend, revisited, at the beautifully installed Wexner 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, it is meant to be relocated and to serve as a prototype for other such houses. Mockbee/Coker Architects followed a similar strategy, also at the Wexner: the firm built a passageway-cumporch of different woods, cables, window screen, cast concrete, tree stumps, blue glass bottles, and other materials drawn from the vernacular architecture of the rural South; it will be attached to a home in Alabama after the exhibition ends. Given these 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 but misses the chance to reorganize passage into the gallery; worse, the pseudo-sculptural

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stacks of drywall end up offering a banal display of common building materials.

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, 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 of spatial control. The Body in Action, by Hodgetts + 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.

WENDY KROMER Wendy Kromer Confections Sandusky, Ohio

RON-BEN ISRAEL Ron Ben-Israel Cakes New York City

“THE PIPING PRO”

“THE ICING INNOVATOR”

ALEXANDRIA PELLEGRINO Cake Opera Co. Toronto, Ontario

SYLVIA WEINSTOCK Sylvia Weinstock Cake New York City

“THE MASTER PAINTER”

“THE FLOWER QUEEN”

Lauri Ditunno Cake Alchemy New York City “THE CANDY WHISPERER”

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“ I am inspired first, then I figure out how to make the vision a reality.�

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At museum, Ten Arquitectos with Guy Nordenson removed a portion of the venerable garden’s marble paving and inserted a wooden ramp/seat assembly in the rubble facing Auguste Rodin’s Monument to Balzac. Visitors descend through the ground plane, sit in the chair, and look up to a lean, 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 interventionist installations that pose genuinely interesting arguments about conditions of architectural exhibition and museum display along with more “immediate” aspects of construction and experience. At museum, Office dA 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–among the Judds and Giacomettis– it risks misreading as a none-too-handsome sculpture, it nonetheless makes a strong urban gesture, both within the garden and when seen from 54th Street.

Along part of the glass curtain wall on the opposite side of the garden, SmithMiller + 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 actually introduce new programs, and both would make welcome permanent museum installations. At the Wexner, Stanley Saitowitz intensified a rather bland space that has

“ I have about three

minutes until the icing hardens. It’s a very delicate race against the clock. I love it.”

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 also 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, tatooed, 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.

CAKE MASTERS

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.

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