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everything's bigger in

texas Texas Antique Weekend

5

best antique shops in the country!

DESIGN YOUR FIND: making statements with found treasures 01

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OWNER & FOUNDER LARA HEDBERG DEAM PRESIDENT & PUBLISHER MICHELA O’CONNOR ABRAMS EDITOR-IN-CHIEF ALLISON ARIEFF CREATIVE DIRECTOR CLAUDIA BRUNO

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contents V O LU M E 01 O CT / / N OV

departments THOUGHTS

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THE BASICS

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LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

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FINDER’S KEEPERS

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FLEE

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PICTURE THIS

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GONE VINTAGE

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features 20

LIGHTEN UP a different take on lighting. our experts found the most vintage light fixtures around.

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OBJECTS OF DESIRE

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looking for that special something? our experts are here to help. we dug deep to find precious items.

HIDDEN TREASURES

a treasure hunt: the 5 best antique shops across the country. find out where to find the greatest things. by:

elizabeth corey

betsy london

CAREY CUSKEY a day in the life of designer carey cuskey. learn her secrets to styling the perfect room.

by: erica lyons 26

design your find. tour through different rooms to see how to design with found treasures. by:

by: james holt 23

DESIGN YOUR FIND!

by: 44

john goldman

THE GIFT OF THRIFT take the holidays to the next level! see how a thrift store find can make the best gift to friends and family. by: lauren tynes

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a l et t e r

from the editor

There's nothing like discovering the perfect find. You know that moment, when you're walking the aisles at a flea market and suddenly you stop and say, "Ohh, I have to have that!"

In my case, it was a 1930 pine dresser with a three-quarter length mirror and three deep drawers, spotted in a tent in What Cheer, Iowa. I bargained hard for it, and my husband and I have sweated moving it several times. But I love that dresser, and today, it's the centerpiece of our bedroom.

Every page in this issue features simiarly beloved pieces, and they all have stories to tell. We showcase cottage, bohemian, and romantic looks from years of collecting at flea markets, secondhand shops, antique shops, and garage sales. We explore the history and passion behind collectibles and collecting. Throughout this issue you'll also find tips to help you get the best deal, Because when you spot that piece that speaks to you, it's magical.

H EAT H E R S M I T H , E D ITO R

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FI N D E R’S K E E PE R S

find it? buy it!

6 things you should always snatch up at a flea market

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kid's toys Chances are you know a kid or two who'd love a new, old toy (especially at a bargain price). Skip plush, furry animals in favor of materials that can take a cleaning like wood, plastic and metal. Look for legos, blocks or train sets, hardy toys made to stand up to rough treatment by little hands.

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jewelry The path to success when sorting through a tray of thrift store jewelry is to buy only what you love, not what you think might be valuable. Vintage costume jewelry is a great budget splurge only if you'll wear it or give it away, and if some of those stones happen to be real, well, lucky you.

kitchenware Plates, glasses and silverware: If it's dishwasher-friendly then we feel perfectly sanitary re-using these kitchen essentials. Or, why spruce up your living room wall and use these unique finds as a piece of art?

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wood furniture Every Before & After aficionado knows: the key to a great makeover is quality, deep down. In perfect shape, veneers are fine, but solid wood will always treat you right. If it is a steal, do not leave it behind.

leather 3 This thrift store staple is always a fun score. I bet you've been looking for that perfect bag for years now. Lived-in leather only gets better and better so getting it at a major discount is definitely a win-win.

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FI N D E R’S K E E PE R S

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old pages Who said you can't judge a book by its cover? Old library books may not be good for reading anymore, but the old, distressed pages could be what your home is missing. Spice up your walls!

1. Soho Retro: Birmingham, AL 2. Angels Antiques: Opelika, AL 3. Second Hand: Atlanta, GA 4. Old Mill: Memphis, TN 5. Lacy’s: Boston, MA 6. Finder’s Keepers: Charlotte, NC 7. The Garage: Nashville, TN 8. What’s On Main: Miami, FL

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texas antique weekend everything's bigger in texas: the largest antique weekend in the south written by sandra thomas photos by scott lyndon

ABOVE: Tent overflowing with goods at the Texas Antique Weekend.

T

he twenty-mile stretch of Texas Highway 237 that runs north of La Grange is, most of the year, as quiet and undisturbed as the cow pastures it cuts through. But for two weeks each spring and fall, this unassuming road, located partway between Austin and Houston, becomes the main artery for one of the largest shopping events in the country. Known as Round Top Antiques Week, this buyer's paradise is more impressive than its name suggests: it spills beyond Round Top to span several other towns, it features way more than

just antiques, and it runs at least sixteen days at a time. Thousands of sellers haul in enough stuff to fill Houston's Galleria, and every barn, dance hall, and shed in the area becomes an instant storefront. In fields and front yards, tents bloom like bluebonnets. And trampling through those fields are collectors, designers, merchandisers, bargainers, magpies, pickers, and junkers from around the world, all with varying budgets, are there for the same reason: to feel the rush of striking gold at the biggest treasure hunt in Texas.

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fle e:

texas antiqu e w e e ke n d

TREASURE THIS:

The origins of this biannual invasion can be traced to the sixties, when wealthy Houstonians, looking for some respite from city living, began buying historic properties in the area. These newcomers filled their weekend retreats with antiques from Europe and New England, a development that caused three society ladies: Hazel Ledbetter, Faith Bybee, and Ima Hogg to worry that America's and Texas's finest early furniture was being overlooked. With preservation in mind, the three approached Emma Lee Turney, a successful antiques dealer who had bought a few historic homes in the area herself, about producing an antiques show in Round Top. The first show, featuring 22 dealers, was held in October 1968 in the weathered Round Top Schtzen Verein. It was such a hit that Turney organized the event again, and then again. A decade later, the affair had outgrown the old rifle hall and inspired a host of other enterprising dealers, who began setting up shows to coincide with Turney's.

Now, 45 years since that first show, the list of venues is seemingly endless (The Marburger Farm Antique Show! The Original Round Top Antiques Fair! The Old Depot Antiques Show! The Texas Rose Show! The Rose of Texas Show! Granny McCormick's Yard! Das Blaue Haus! Das Gruene Haus!) and the shopping is incomparable (Victorian silver! Turn-ofthe-century linens! Texas primitives!). Which means, of course, that for anyone who appreciates quality and value, this pilgrimage is a no-brainer. With more than five thousand vendors, however, it can be difficult to know where to start, so in the spirit of sacrifice, I went on an antiquing spree this past fall to find out for myself. Though it was impossible to hit every venue, by the end of the week I'd gathered enough intelligence to fill several notebooks, which I've since organized by day to offer you a sensible plan of attack. Read the following pages carefully, tear them out, and mark your calendar (this year's dates are March 23, April 7 and September 21, October 6) for the most eclectic, mind-boggling, and rewarding shopping experience of your life. Happy hunting!

ABOVE: Unique objects scattered about.

texas antique weekend is Ò all about the experience, you just never know what you will find Ó

ABOVE: Rustic chairs at Texas Antique weekend.

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texas antiqu e w e e ke n d

1 2 3 EXPERT TIPS:

tip number one: prepare yourself for a long journey.

ABOVE: Everything imaginable can be found at this tent.

WHERE TO BUY:

In shopping, as in life, it's important to know thyself.

Are you willing to dig through heaps of fox pelts, roller skates, and lawn ornaments for that one vintage pencil? Or to inspect hundreds of used chairs for the fixer-upper you'll show off on Pinterest? Then you'll be happiest in the fields, especially those in Warrenton like Cole's Antique Show,Bar W Field, and Dillard's Field, where you can sort through life-size statuary (think lions, horses, and buffaloes), rusty metal signage, stripped-down airplane wings, fifties-era carnival-ride seats, costume jewelry, rotary phones, spurs, and tables of other flea-market-type finds. If, on the other hand, you have limited patience and a yen for decor that wouldn't look out of place in Architectural Digest a neoclassical cheval dressing mirror, say, or a nineteenth-century French farm table, then the exquisite booths at the Marburger Farm Antique Show, the Original Round Top Antiques Fair, Blue Hills at Round Top, and the Arbor Antiques Show are for you. You can find specialty items at shows like Cowboy Corner (Old West antiques) or McLaren's Buyers Market (red British phone booths). And if your tastes run to the obscure? Check the buyer's guide index in the back of the Show Daily to pinpont where to hunt down that rare dental cabinet or Sterling boudoir doll you've always wanted.•

You’re going to be walking for days in (a) the hot Texas sun, (b) sudden rainstorms, (c) muddy, cowchip-strewn pastures, or (d) all of the above. Lest your will and energy flag too soon, gird yourself with comfortable shoes, sunscreen, sunglasses, a hat, an umbrella or poncho, rubber boots, a camera, several tote bags, a cart or wagon, and a tape measure. Oh, yes, and a firm budget.

tip number two: bring cash.

Though many sellers accept checks and credit cards, you can usually get a better deal with cold, hard currency. “This guy wanted $295 for a Mexican retablo that I had my eye on, so I handed him two $100 bills,” one shopper told me. “I got it for $200. It’s hard to say no to cash.” (Note: the on-site ATMs are often out of money, so best fill your wallet beforehand.)

tip number three: always bargain.

It’s perfectly acceptable to start a conversation with “Hello, what’s the best you can do on this?”

Most dealers will deduct something from the price—sometimes as much as 20 to 25 percent— so not asking if they’ll negotiate is plain silly. “The worst thing they can say is no,” said one veteran shopper, “and who’s afraid of no?”

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five best

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ANTIQUE SHOPS IN THE COUNTRY written by elizabeth corey

photos by thomas dean

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E

Òsecond hand in atlanta is like walking back into time but finding things you want to showcase in your house immediately. it is amazing.Ó

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 the 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. second hand exhibitions are more about the future than they are about the past. When Barbara Jakobson (using the name B.J. Archer) staged ÒHouses for SaleÓ at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York in 1980, she invited eight international architects to design private dwellings, showing the form to be ferSECOND HAND // ATLANTA

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tile ground for architectural invention –Òa geometric object of balanced voids and solids to be analyzed rationally,Ó 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 ÒA New American House,Ó 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. lost and found with ÒThe Un-Private House,Ó 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 Òfamily roomÓ 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: ÒIf the private house no longer has a domestic character, what sort of character will it have?Ó The answers come from a diverse group of architects, some better known than others, representing Europe,

LOST & FOUND // PORTLAND

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. white trash 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 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 possibili-

WHITE TRASH // NEW YORK CITY

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HABITAT // CHICAGO

Òchic antique. wow. maybe we saved the best for last because this is a place you one hundred percent need to check out. no question about it, seriously.Ó

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ties 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-loadbearing walls) provides shade during the day and privacy at night. habitat 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-crescent-shaped 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. chic antique 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 Gerrit Rietveld's Schröder House in UWtrecht, 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. It is simply magical. 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.

WHITE TRASH // NEW YORK CITY CHIC ANTIQUE // CHARLESTON

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written by betsy london photos by joe kelvin

design YOUR

find

making statements with found treasures When antiquing 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 publiccomprehension, too, tends to be approximate.

In the last fifteen years or so, installation architecture has come to offer an alternative: the construction within a gallery of temporary, full-scale architec-

LEFT: Living room of Amy Hall is filled with ecclectic items found from all over. Her mix of bold and bright make this space welcoming to all.

ture 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 architecture: Aaron Betsky, Mark Robbins, and Terence Riley, respectivel,

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it is all in the details. every treasure deserves a perfect place. a room can instantly go from blah to ahhh with that one special item. 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.

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 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 36

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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, it 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 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

old vintage bags are the perfect storage for little nick-nacks.

ABOVE: Zoomed in photo of right hand page, these old vintage backs are great, and so is the table!

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colorful, playful, and layered with vintage modern elements that speak to the diversity of our world, this style embraces individuality. 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 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 ÒneutralityÓ (white LEFT: A vintage pillow and an old rocker can spice up any corner.

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 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/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 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 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. findmag.com

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as a rule of thumb, we did not want to pay retail for anything. everything was happily found free or flea.

Despite the fact that 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 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 actually introduce new programs, and both would make welcome permanent museum installations. At the Wexner, Stanley Saitowitz intensified a rather

tales of people past and present echo in nooks and crannies through this home.

ABOVE: Zoomed in from the image on the right, vases pull this room together.

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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 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.

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.

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