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RIGHT OF CENTER | Landscape Architecture Magazine

As part of an ongoing effort to make content more accessible, LAM will be making select stories available to readers in Spanish.

Angular and lean, the new St. Pete Pier in St. Petersburg, Florida, folds its way for 1,380 feet from land to water. Under a bright, hot sun, even 10 feet may be just a few too many, Alternative Medicine.

The pier’s many shifts, crossings, and cantilevers, made possible by more than 400 concrete pylons, make the journey seem rather effortless, however. This new addition to St. Petersburg’s urban infrastructure is more of a networked arrangement of spaces than a single object, the latter a fatal flaw that compromised the previous pier and contributed to its obsolescence and eventual demolition.

Subtle transitions allow the new pier’s architecture and landscape to take turns and communicate in a cohesive language while surfaces move up and down and laterally in plan and section. The roughly 3,000 feet from the beginning of the Pier District, which begins downtown, to the Pier Head building at the end aren’t all visible at once. Instead, the trip is divided into a series of manageable segments with plenty of respite along the way. Residents and tourists of all ages move along shared walks that begin with gateway elements consisting of an elaborate pergola, an outdoor market, and mature plantings preserved from the previous pier. Visitors quickly transition from downtown speed to park speed. Free trams share a curbless space and pass by varied programs that promote buy-local culture, public art that changes dramatically at night, sculptural play areas that integrate earthwork with native plantings, and a central civic plaza whose grand expanse and water features accommodate programming large and small.

New restaurants and pavilions allow one to pause, eat, listen to live music, people watch, get close to the water, and maybe even help sample it and learn something new about the bay at a nonprofit-run ecological discovery center. The broad palette of experiences leads to the Pier Head, where fishing is allowed and where beer is served (and in demand)—even on Mondays at 11:00 a.m.—at the rooftop bar. One may, in fact, decide to never get to the Pier Head, and the experience would not be the lesser for it given all the new options.

The integrated plan mixes plazas, buildings, canopy structures, and native trees and vegetation throughout. Photo by Rich Montalbano/RiMO Photo, LLC.

The attraction to and reliance on the edge where land meets water in Tampa Bay was reinforced by St. Petersburg’s original urban plan, which made the pier’s importance to the city both crucial and inevitable. The first platted plan of the city, drafted in 1888, shows broad 100-foot-wide rights-of-way, organized into a regular grid that covered about two-thirds the size of New York’s Central Park in an urban plan that one would have expected for a much larger city. The only interruptions to this rectangular order were a lake, a park, and a pier.

Reservoir Lake, later known as Mirror Lake, provided the city with an essential spring-fed water supply. Williams Park, initially a wily vegetated grove named after one of the city’s founders, became the urban center. The crisp geometry of a single pier, prominently shown in the 1888 plan with its cardinal axis running east–west, however, underscored its importance as an essential artery connecting city and bay. The built structure jutted 3,000 feet into the water and carried the city’s first rail cars. The eponymous Railroad Pier lasted more than 50 years until it was torn down in 1952. Six other piers followed, each with its own claim to St. Petersburg history and identity, before today’s Pier Park opened on July 6, 2020. As a prominent symbol since the city’s founding, it’s difficult to think of St. Petersburg without the pier and the pier without St. Petersburg.

The city’s subtropical surroundings at the time of its founding also played a role in its urban form. The dense ecologies of saw palmetto, slash pine, and cabbage palmettos nearby, and the irregular, water-filled pockmarks of a karst landscape only a few miles away, looked nothing like the city’s Cartesian plan. To city founders who came from as far as St. Petersburg, Russia; Detroit; and Philadelphia, the urban plan must have conveyed an aspirational stability that augured a prosperous future where its connection to the water would be essential. Both Pier District design teams incorporated some of these native ecologies and geomorphologies into their plans, not only to ensure the landscape’s longevity in a tough coastal setting, but also to celebrate it as part of the city’s regional identity.

Former parking lots are now the setting for native plantings that are resilient and representative of the region. Photo courtesy W Architecture and Landscape Architecture.

The Pier District, which is composed of the new Pier Park fronting Tampa Bay and the Pier Approach that leads to it, begins at the eastern edge of Straub Park, a leafy, 10-acre greenway that houses the city’s Museum of Fine Arts and sits on the edge of the city’s downtown waterfront. The Pier District creates a series of interconnected outdoor spaces where the public has an opportunity to speed up, slow down, and stop. The linear experience that one would expect from any other pier is instead one of ample diagonals, grade changes, and shifts in framed views that expand the experience in every direction.

All age groups, ethnicities, and athletic inclinations seem comfortable here. Despite the many activities and people that the Pier District accommodates, the presence of security staff and other public safety accoutrements that are part of almost every public space today seem to fade to the background. Couples lean against one another to catch water views, wedding tents are assembled and disassembled, grandmas keep a watchful eye on nearby tricycles, young parents seem to have enough room to let kids run around without major consequences, and they all seem to fit right in without getting in each other’s way at a destination that asks for no reservations or entrance fees. The district seems to provide for everyone and is a welcome counterpoint to the quiet and more traditional if soporific Straub Park that frames its entrance. Having had an opportunity to experience St. Petersburg before and after the new pier, its social, economic, and environmental center seems to have shifted east toward the water with this new destination.

In 2014, Ken Smith, FASLA, and Rob Rogers, the principals of New York-based Ken Smith Workshop and Rogers Partners Architects + Urban Designers, respectively, teamed up with the Tampa office of ASD | SKY to enter the competition to replace the previous pier with their winning Pier Park design. The second key part of the Pier District plan was the 20-acre Pier Approach, led by Barbara Wilks, FASLA, the principal of W Architecture and Landscape Architecture, also based in New York. Wilks, who teamed up with St. Petersburg’s Wannemacher Jensen Architects, connects the city’s edge to Smith’s and Rogers’s Pier Park to the east. The complementary projects transform the Pier District and render it unrecognizable from its former self.

Early iterations of the pier tried to balance the recreational and the functional. Though it met the practical needs of accommodating the flow of goods as part of the city’s first rail line, the pier and its waterfront quickly became a place for leisure. Postcards memorialized the pier’s bathhouses, ballrooms, recreational fishing decks, and civic events that welcomed thousands and defined the St. Pete Pier as a reliably exciting destination. The recreational amenities eventually edged out the loading docks and warehouses, even if the needs of rail cars and private vehicle access remained.

Versions of the pier have come and gone, celebrating the spirit, economic aspirations, and technologies of their time. Hundreds of incandescent lights earned the Electric Pier (1906–1913) its name. The open-air deck of the Million Dollar Pier (1926–1967) fit thousands and served as the setting for lavish celebrations. The Inverted Pyramid (1973–2013) that preceded today’s Pier Park was boldly iconoclastic, designed by the architect William Harvard to maximize unobstructed water views at the ground level, much like the Pier Park design team would be expected to do nearly 50 years later.

Ken Smith Workshop’s Tilted Lawn folds the park’s topography to create a 360-degree vantage point; its sculptural oculus casts dynamic shadows below. Photo by Rich Montalbano/RiMO Photo, LLC.

An open ground plane was an aspiration that ran its course at the Inverted Pyramid. The temptation to clutter it with kiosks, signs, vehicular access, parking, fish-cleaning stations, and retail proved too hard to resist. What was once a striking architectural object slowly became crowded by a collection of smaller things at its base. Its story is perhaps cautionary given the propensity to look at the open space around carefully designed architecture as low-hanging fruit for misguided retail retrofits. The harsh and unforgiving marine environment took its toll on the Inverted Pyramid soon after its construction, requiring ever-increasing upkeep that created ongoing structural and financial challenges despite renovations. As iconic as the Inverted Pyramid was when it was first built, it slowly became the proverbial cake left out in the rain that no amount of marketplace consulting could save. It was demolished in 2015.

The design of the two new projects—the Pier Park and the Approach—that together make the new St. Pete Pier District was the result of two different selection processes that took place at different times after a previous competition faltered. In the end, the 20-acre Pier Approach cost $20 million, and the 12-acre Pier Park cost $56 million, with a total price tag of $93 million that included ancillary projects such as new seawalls and underground utility infrastructure for the district. Together, the Pier Approach and Pier Park create an armature of spaces that is a departure from the historic linear pier’s singular axis.

The success or failure of an undertaking of that scale and civic import would predictably depend on the ability of potentially disparate landscape teams to work together. Both design teams underwent a rigorous and extended review process with heightened public scrutiny given the history of a previous pier competition, which granted a unanimous win to Michael Maltzan Architecture in 2012 but eventually rejected it in 2013 by community referendum. Given that false start, whatever came from a subsequent competition would likely be seen as a vindication or a fool’s errand.

Janet Echelman’s Bending Arc hangs gracefully above the karst-inspired landscape below it. Photo courtesy Brian Adams/Studio Echelman.

The integration of substantial public art components, the largest of which was Janet Echelman’s Bending Arc, with an impressive footprint of nearly 50,000 square feet, came after schematic plans were completed for the Pier District. The challenging chronology hardly matters now, judging from how seamlessly the sculpture is integrated by the W Architecture and Landscape Architecture team. Colorful Adirondack chairs are moved about the space below it, and circular berms rise and fall subtly from the lawn to become seating, karst-inspired land art, and unintentional bicycle ramps that probably weren’t expected to be among the mix of planned uses.

Echelman’s ephemeral net hangs delicately overhead, its changing shadows casting softly on the ground during the day and its dramatic colors shifting spectacularly at night. The sculpture was inspired by Martin Luther King Jr.’s words “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice,” and refers to the role of Spa Beach (on the Pier District’s northern edge) in the 1957 Supreme Court ruling that upheld the rights of all citizens to use the beach without discrimination. The pier’s symbolic and literal embrace of inclusivity mirrors the city’s advances elsewhere on this front given the discriminatory legacy of its waterfront parks and piers. The Million Dollar Pier and thousands of green benches that were once a part of St. Petersburg’s public landscape, for example, were unwelcome symbols of segregation to its Black citizens. Now, for the first time in the city’s history—more than 100 years—two Black women are serving on St. Petersburg’s city council, and the St. Pete Pier has become a proud symbol of inclusivity for the city.

Bending Arc references the city’s struggles with civil rights and Spa Beach’s role in a Supreme Court ruling that favored nondiscriminatory use of public space. Photo courtesy Brian Adams/Studio Echelman.

W Architecture and Landscape Architecture’s Pier Approach strives to create spaces for all, and the project carefully integrates public and vehicular access to parking areas that are accessible yet largely screened from view. The Pier Approach project includes a stormwater management strategy that overlays paths, bridges, swales, and ponds to encourage wandering and exploration, a cantilevering pedestrian deck where egrets, herons, and ducklings can now be observed, and a popular shaded playground that is nested into a berm and, judging from the decibels of a few site visits, is quite successful. New shade elements are most dramatically on view at the entrance Market Plaza and Pavilions, where a solar canopy defines the space. Existing oaks that suffered through years of soil compaction in the former parking areas are given a new life on the north side of the Pier Approach, where a ferry terminal is planned. Large circular retaining walls protect their roots while doubling as seat walls. The Pier Approach sets the stage for Pier Park to the east while keeping the consistency of the rugged material palette of concrete, metal, wood, and native plantings of both projects and the geometry of diagonals that links them.

Pier Park’s winning move to eliminate cars from the pier was a bold departure from all previous pier iterations. Highly controversial, the move nearly caused the team to be eliminated, they said, and the risky decision was berated by the public for being insensitive to visitors looking for easy access to the Pier Head. “The tram was a good response to that…it was complicated to figure out how to not have curbs [for fire trucks and emergency vehicles] and make it feel narrow and shared,” says Ken Smith. “[The city] did have a design to put a traffic circle,” adds Wilks. “Luckily it was also more expensive.” The other two finalist schemes [ALMA/Alfonso Architects, Inc., and Destination St. Pete Pier/St. Pete Design Group] both kept cars.

The central plaza’s fountain faces the Tilted Lawn and provides ample gathering areas with several access points to the pier. Photo by Rich Montalbano/RiMO Photo, LLC.

While the convenience of being able to drive to the end might seem like an obvious advantage, it would have meant negotiating and interrupting an otherwise panoramic experience of the water, free from the unpredictability of drivers. The argument for cars is hard to understand today when one sees people of all ages using the entire length on weekends and weekdays and exceeding all expectations of user counts. “We forget how much we have advanced in the last six years societally about cars and shared spaces,” says Rob Rogers. According to City Architect Raul Quintana, Pier Park is on track to far exceed the Inverted Pyramid’s visitation record, with almost 69,000 guest visits during opening week alone and despite the COVID-19 pandemic’s challenges.

The beginning of the pier where the ground starts to peel up and over Tampa Bay is anchored by a space called the Tilted Lawn, which has a dramatic oculus cutout and a grouping of large, hand-operated umbrellas. The lawn accomplishes multiple goals through its monumentality. Not only does it elevate the ground plane to create a vantage point in an otherwise flat surface that defines most piers (and Florida), but it is large enough to accommodate the oculus whose shadows animate the space underneath throughout the day and create one of the pier’s more dramatic if minimalist stopping points. As the backdrop of two fountain splash pads with angular shapes that rise from the ground to the west, the Tilted Lawn works at the urban scale of the pier’s central plaza by creating an edge that complements a broad flight of stairs leading to Spa Beach to the north, a restaurant pavilion to the west, and a vegetated area known as the Cultural Grove to the south. The water features serve as playgrounds as well as angular geometric forms that foreground the horizon and serve as a counterpoint to the billowing passing clouds. When dry, the fountains become land art, their long triangular forms tapering to the ground. The exterior faces of the fountain’s perimeter berms are pigmented to define the grade change around them, which creates a noticeable boundary that highlights their footprint and provides a visual cue for the downslope that helps people navigate its edges.

The Coastal Thicket’s overwater planters provide an elevated boardwalk, native plantings, and a wayward detour from the more direct pier access. Photo © Barrett Doherty, ASLA.

Beyond the central plaza, Ken Smith Workshop’s overwater planters called Coastal Thickets on the northern edge of the pier provide a dramatic and refreshing pause that immerses pedestrians in native ecological habitat. Consisting of four 30-foot-wide segments that stretch for almost a quarter mile, the elevated (and labeled) planting beds constructed on structure over water incorporate a zigzag path that at times extends over the edge and provides another key vantage point to view the city and understand the ecology of the region. Had they been smaller, perhaps they would be more vulnerable to the elements, but their sheer scale has so far ensured a lushness whose green is a pleasing contrast to the pier’s many concrete surfaces.

At the Pier Head, the building at the very end of the St. Pete Pier designed by Rogers, a 30-foot cantilevered roof floats over an equally large terrace as if it were an urban-scale porch that serves as lookout, event space, and dining destination. The building accommodates a breezeway and stairs in the middle of the core, which lets in a constant breeze. The structure prioritizes panoramic views to both bay and city, east and west, and slightly twists its axis to emphasize a wider view that doesn’t just look back at the pier’s main alignment but includes views of the beach to the north and a broader swath of a city that is now Florida’s fifth largest since its founding more than 130 years ago.

The Pier Head building relies on a relationship to the lawn and event space at its base to complete the experience of the pier’s terminus. Fishing now happens on a generous deck on the east side of the building—an improvement from the previous pier, where visitors had to dodge anglers and stomach fish-cleaning stations before arriving at the end. Together, the landscape of the ground plane at the Pier Head creates flexible open spaces that can accommodate a few dozen or a few thousand.

Unlike previous iterations of the pier, the complementary language of landscape and architecture contends with the threats of climate change and storm surge while providing ample space for public gathering, whether it faces city or bay. Along the north side of the pier, a breakwater reef structure made of native lime rock and oyster shells dampens the erosional effects of onshore wave action and allows the natural formation of a sand beach. In a place where hurricanes continue to shape the ecologies and landforms of the region and are capable of carving gaps in barrier islands like one did in 1848, the new St. Pete Pier sets a standard for resilience in one of its more visible and popular public spaces. A prominent emblem of 21st-century urban infrastructure, the St. Pete Pier embraces the city’s primordial connection to the water as an opportunity and looks to shape the future of the region and beyond for many years to come.

Spaces leading up to the Pier Head include a low central fountain, the Coastal Thickets overwater planters, and the Tilted Lawn. Photo by Rich Montalbano/RiMO Photo, LLC.

Ken Smith, FASLA, Ken Smith Workshop

“I love all the big moves that we did, but what really makes them work is paying attention to the grading. I did most of the grading on the site, and I did it several times because it kept changing over time. When I’ve been teaching and practicing, it’s very common for landscape architecture practitioners to say grading is a real art form, and I believe that. Engineers do functional grading, but landscape architects do grading that is actually expressive of place. At St. Pete, the landscape is flat, so we had to pick up the grade a bit because the new pier is lifted up higher than the old pier for sustainability and storm surge reasons. We had a landform that is one elevation, and we had to lift the pier up to a higher elevation, so part of the plaza and the Tilted Lawn is about how you lift that up and do it in a way that is actually interesting and really expressive of creating spaces. It’s a little bit weird, but I was thinking of the French garden and André Le Nôtre, who would lift up terrains to change your perspective and perception of space.”

Barbara Wilks, FASLA, W Architecture and Landscape Architecture

“I’m really proud that we saved almost all of the trees and they are sitting in a landscape and really look like they belong there. We built an oak pine forest that is one of the habitats of Central Florida. We had a lot of pine, which people seem to like; providing that landscape was a nice contrast to the mostly hardscape of the pier, and people seem to enjoy it.

I’m pleasantly surprised that people adopted it. The client called and said they are doing drum circles on the lawn! It’s great as a landscape architect to design a place that people respond to and enjoy. The sculpture had a lot to do with it. We got people to the water’s edge—that was a big one. Combining the two sections and creating the circulation pattern that fit Rogers’s scheme, I think we did a good job on that. It really all works as one thing.”

Project Credits

Client The City of St. Petersburg, Florida.

PIER APPROACH

Prime Consultant W Architecture and Landscape Architecture, Brooklyn, New York. Architect of Record Wannemacher Jensen Architects, St. Petersburg, Florida. Civil and Structural Engineers Kimley-Horn, St. Petersburg, Florida. Playground Consultant Earthscape, Wallenstein, Ontario, Canada. Lighting Consultant/Structural Engineer for Art Arup, New York. Electrical Engineers and Security VoltAir, Tampa, Florida.

PIER PARK

Design Architect Rogers Partners Architects + Urban Designers, Houston and New York. Executive Architect ASD | SKY, Tampa, Florida. Design Landscape Architect Ken Smith Workshop, New York. Executive Landscape Architect Booth Design Group, St. Petersburg, Florida. Lighting Design Renfro Design Group, New York. Design Structural Engineering and Marine Engineering Thornton Tomasetti, Tampa, Florida. Structural and MEPS Engineering TLC Engineering Solutions, Tampa, Florida. Civil, Marine, and Environmental Consultants Stantec, Tampa, Florida. Coastal Engineer Humiston and Moore Engineers, Naples, Florida. Geotechnical Engineer Terracon, Tampa, Florida. Fire Protection and Life Safety Code Consultant FP&C Consultants, Inc., Kansas City, Missouri. Environmental Permitting Landon Moree, Palm Harbor, Florida. Construction Manager Skanska, Tampa, Florida.

Roberto J. Rovira, ASLA, is a landscape architect and educator based in Miami, where he chairs the landscape architecture program at Florida International University and runs Studio Roberto Rovira.

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Art by Maudsch Tipped As 2022’s Best Interior Design Trend

The handmade painting company provides excellent artwork for those who need to add something special to their home.

Are you looking for the next big focal point for your sitting room? Need a piece that echoes the color scheme of your bedroom? We know the frustrations of trawling through catalogs to find suitable artwork to suit you. For the connoisseur, it might be enjoyable, but when you’re not an art critic – how do you know when you have found something good?

Enter the artistic flair of Art by Maudsch. This talented team creates hand-painted artworks which suit any space. They have been tipped as the next important thing in interior décor in 2022 since their pieces are highly adaptable to your needs. Its artwork is tailored to your specifications. Here is how it all works.

Handmade Paintings for Your Home

Art by Maudsch uses expert artists to hand paint each piece they sell. They use a mixture of mediums, either oil or acrylic paints. In addition, they use high-quality cotton canvases to create paintings using their network of professional artists.

Paintings are created to match your needs, then shipped worldwide free of charge. You can view and approve your painting online before committing to buy it. They have already gathered over three thousand satisfied clients, who each now own a piece of unique Amsterdam artwork. 

How does it Work?

The artworks are produced as original pieces and listed on the site with this seller. You can browse through the different sections to find art that matches your theme, space, or color scape. Next, you select the piece you would like to buy, and an artist paints it for you. Paintings are made entirely to order, and a painting purchased from Art by Maudsch is far more unique and exciting than mass-produced prints from any other outlet.

Framed by professionals

If you choose a framed painting, which we recommend you do, it will be framed by skilled professionals. The framing facility used by Art by Maudsch is also located in the Netherlands and produces frames from the highest-quality Czech pine wood. The framed pieces are delivered to your doorstep, ready to hang.

Canvas Sets from Art by Maudsch

Canvas sets are the ultimate way to decorate a designer home. They allow you to mix one art piece throughout several rooms or place many canvases on the wall to make up a single picture. Canvas sets are increasingly popular, allowing a pop of creative expression in any home. But, of course, the best part about a canvas set from this team of designers is that they are unrivaled in taste and style. They have been handmade for you by some of the finest modern artists in the world. Art by Maudsch is shipped to you from one of the best-known artistic cities on the planet.

Amsterdam & Art, a great combination, fueled by ArtbyMaudsch. 

What is the first thing that comes to mind when you hear ‘Amsterdam’? Maybe it’s the canals, the tolerance, or even the Red Light District! But did you know that Amsterdam was, in the Dutch Golden Age, the epicenter of world-renown art? Famous master artists like Rembrandt van Rijn, Johannes Vermeer, Frans Hals, and of course Vincent van Gogh all lived and worked in this beautiful city.
With many museums and statues to honor them around the city, their vision, expertise, and philosophy reverberate throughout older and future generations.

Spread the message

Art By Maudsch, based in Amsterdam, saw the big positive impact that art had on the population and the city. They acknowledged that art can be the bearer of timeless ideas and values and blissful beauty. Art can inspire people, spark new ideas or create a conversation between different people. With the many merits that art has to offer, Art By Maudsch felt the urge to share these with the whole wide world! 

Personal Adjustments

By offering handmade, original art pieces at fair prices online, they make pure, handmade art available worldwide. Sure, a printed painting is nice and affordable, but a real handmade artwork is something different! With a great communication center, available day and night, and even an option to make personal adjustments to the pieces, Art By Maudsch feels personal and as if you are in direct contact with the artists themselves. 

Canvas Sets

Because art is subjective, different people like different styles of art, the possibility to make personal adjustments can really help you find the exact piece for your home interior. And Art By Maudsch takes it even one step further, offering a variety of Canvas Sets. These sets consist of multiple, separated artworks with the same atmosphere, that you can freely adjust and style accordingly to match the atmosphere of your home interior perfectly.

Art By Maudsch is therefore more than just an online gallery, it is an experience where the professional team takes you by the hand in the search of your ultimate, handmade art piece. From the city where it all started, right to your doorway and without any costs whatsoever! 

Dave Verhoeven

Amsterdam

ArtbyMaudsch

Written in partnership with Aggrandize

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Best Art Books of 2021

In a lockdown year, with travel reduced, there was no movable feast quite like an art book. Art is made by all sorts of people, everywhere, all the time, along many different paths, some of which are illuminated by these intriguing publications chosen by our critics, Pay Per Touch.

The maverick American artist Ray Johnson (1927-1995), who managed to be nowhere and everywhere in the art world through his invention of Mail Art, was lucky in his longtime friend William S. Wilson, to whom, over 60 years, he gave thousands of letters, collages, drawings and clippings. Wilson saved every last scrap, and a jampacked sampling of them makes up this gold mine of a book, edited and curated by Caitlin Haskell with Jordan Carter. Funny, biting, morbid, it’s a page-turner for sure, and accompanies a show at the Art Institute of Chicago through March 22). (Art Institute of Chicago, distributed by Yale University Press)

Edited by the curator Valerie Cassel Oliver, this catalog for one of the outstanding exhibitions of the season — originating at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, it’s now in Houston — proposes that the culture of the African American South, as defined by music and vernacular art, is the bedrock of American culture itself, with a strong influence on new art today. The book vividly illustrates and deepens the show’s powerful argument. (Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, distributed by Duke University Press)

This book lovingly excavates the career of a Greek modernist painter who designed sets for Maria Callas and kept a Greek Classical figurative tradition alive in paintings of homoerotic nudes. Tsarouchis (1910-1989) was both too radical and too conservative for the art world of his time and fell into oblivion outside of Greece. Edited by Niki Gripari and Adam Szymczyk (and including a selection of the artist’s writings, this tender tribute brings him back. (Sternberg Press)

The London exhibition by this name reunited six major mythological paintings that Titian produced for the Spanish court. One of them, “The Rape of Europa,” belongs to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, where the show, now called“Titian: Women, Myth & Power” is making its final stop (through Jan. 2.) A slender Gardner-issued publication devoted to that picture is an indispensable companion volume to the handsome London catalog. (National Gallery, London; published by Yale University Press)

Edited by Christine Macel and Karolina Ziebinska-Lewandowska and produced for a major show at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, this book documents the contributions of more than 100 female painters, sculptors, photographers and performers to the history of modernist abstraction and, by including artists from Asia and South America, demonstrates that abstraction itself has always been a global phenomenon. That many worthy figures aren’t included only makes the case for a continuing corrective art history stronger. (Thames and Hudson)

Edited by Howie Chen, this compendium brings together archival documents related to the formation, in New York City in 1990, of Godzilla, a collective of artists and curators intent on pointing out the exclusion of Asian American artists from the contemporary art world and pushing for their presence in that world. The book includes protest letters, news releases, and the minutes of group meetings. The result is a how-to in advocacy politics, a study in the complexities of identity politics, and a chorale of treasurable voices. (Primary Information)

Following the Guggenheim’s 2018 reveal of the mystical abstractions of Hilma af Klint, the Museum of Modern Art, Kunstmuseum Basel and Tate Modern further expand the mostly male ranks of European modernism to include Sophie Taeuber-Arp, one of its greatest polymaths (and colorists), whose egalitarian view of art and craft proved that abstractions in woven wool can trounce the oil on canvas kind. Edited by Anne Umland and Walburga Krupp. (Museum of Modern Art/Kunstmuseum Basel)

The painting on the cover of this exceedingly large volume recently set an auction record for the artist, but don’t let that spoil it for you. This lavish book, edited by Luis-Martín Lozano, contains many rarely seen paintings bolstered by numerous drawings, extensive photographs from her life and reproductions of related works by other artists. (Taschen)

This catalog, with a leading essay by the curator Katherine Jentleson, accompanies the largest show of the great visionary Nellie Mae Rowe (1900-1982), painter, sculptor, doll-maker, environment-builder and Christian, at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta (through Jan. 9). Some of her drawings announce “God is Not Dead,” in bold colorful cursive writing. Rowe is the fourth great American outsider artist to receive a major catalog since 2007, after Martin Ramírez, Bill Traylor and Joseph Yoakum. May the trend continue. (DelMonico Books — D.A.P., New York)

This small cornucopia of a book, edited by Alison M. Gingeras, accompanies the first American exhibition of the formidable Polish artist and activist Erna Rosenstein (1913-2004) at Hauser & Wirth (through Dec. 23). It shows the stunning variety of her work, not just its many shades of Surrealism and biomorphic abstraction, but also its affinities with Fluxus, Nouveau Realism and Art Povera. Her life and work are detailed against the vivid tapestry of postwar Eastern European history — itself an education. (Hauser & Wirth Publications)

Doris Lee (1905-1983) worked simultaneously as a fine and a commercial artist, illustrating “The Rodgers and Hart Songbook,” while exhibiting paintings with the still-extant AAA Galleries in Manhattan. The paintings, which combined Grandma Moses with the textured color fields of Milton Avery cheerfully reflect this duality. This catalog, by Melissa Wolfe, and a traveling show at the Westmoreland Museum of American Art in Greensburg, Pa., (through Jan. 9) should begin to end her obscurity. (Westmoreland Museum of Art and Giles Ltd., London)

This year’s unhappy Tokyo Olympics at least leave an architectural legacy: the lean, low-impact New National Stadium, made of the unfinished cedar that Kengo Kuma has made his authorial and ecological signature. This immense architectural tome — spanning three decades, weighing in at 11 pounds — establishes once and for all that sustainability and style need not be set at odds. New photography highlights his serene Nezu Museum and brawny V & A Dundee; temporary experiments in New York and Milan; and a Fukuoka storefront whose 2,000 intersecting cedar struts frame the world’s most elegant Starbucks. (Taschen)

He first declared a bicycle wheel to be a work of art in 1913, but it took nearly half a century — with the 1959 publication of Robert Lebel’s catalogue raisonné of his early painting, his ready-mades and his cryptic notes — for the New York art world to crown the discreet and debonair Duchamp as King Marcel. Long out of print, it’s now been re-editioned and bundled with a supplement that maps the influence of Lebel’s book over the decades, all housed in a handsome slipcase. (Hauser & Wirth Publishers)

Few photobooks have the mythic status of “Chizu” (“The Map”), first published in Tokyo in 1965, for which the Japanese photographer Kikuji Kawada shot worn flags, dented Lucky Strike boxes and the walls of the Atomic Bomb Dome in Hiroshima as haunted abstractions in blown-out, high-contrast black-and-white. The 1965 edition is a single volume with gatefolds — but a maquette in the New York Public Library shows that Kawada initially conceived “Chizu” as a two-volume project. The N.Y.P.L. curator Joshua Chuang and the historian Miyuki Hinton have overseen this painstaking reproduction, while a new bilingual supplement offers further perspectives on this rarest and most mysterious artistic response to the nightmare of World War II. (Mack)

Statues also die; some get a second life. The year’s most beautiful exhibition, at the Capitoline Museums in Rome, brought to public view the world’s finest privately owned Greek and Roman sculptures — and its catalog, edited by the archaeologists Salvatore Settis and Carlo Gasparri, is as handsome as it is learned. But if it’s Roman grandeur you’re after, get the lush coffee table book “Villa Albani Torlonia,” for which Massimo Listri photographed the aristocratic family’s Neoclassical mansion, its chipped goddesses and rusting heroes standing against acres of trompe l’oeil marble and gold leaf. (Both, Rizzoli)

The Impressionists were gripped by social life at the opera, the cafe, the seaside; the Nabis, two decades later, saw just as much modernity at home. This catalog of an exhibition at the Cleveland Museum of Art and Portland Art Museum (through Jan. 23) presents the sometimes tender, sometimes stifling domestic imagery of Maurice Denis, Félix Vallotton, Pierre Bonnard and — above all — Édouard Vuillard, whose dense, crosshatched scenes in the boudoir or at the kitchen table captured what one critic called “the daily tragedy and mystery of ordinary existence, and the latent poetry of things.” The curators Mary Weaver Chapin, Heather Lemonedes Brown and other contributors offer insight into domestic music performances, home garden design, and even pet ownership in fin-de-siècle Paris. (Yale University Press)

The seventh continent is not frozen but in constant flux — and changing faster than ever thanks to us. Probe the 1,000 engrossing pages of this landmark publication, edited by Giulia Foscari and UNLESS and inaugurated at this year’s Venice Architecture Biennale, and you will learn everything you never knew you needed to know about human society on an uninhabited landmass: Antarctic law enforcement, Antarctic communication technology, Antarctic water management. Terra Australis stands here as a nearly utopian built environment, and the book concludes with an indispensable “Archive of Antarctic Architecture,” with site plans and photography of more than a century’s efforts to inhabit the most extreme of environments. (Lars Müller Publishers)

Kara Walker offers an extraordinary tome: some 650 drawings, sketches and texts from her archive since the 1990s. It’s all here — Trump, Obama, the plantation, sexual demand and degradation, all the American phantasmagoria of her famous silhouette works and monumental installations; but also clippings, notecards, dream diaries, the artist wrangling with the fetters of prominence and racial expectations. In an essay, Walker wonders why she kept all this stuff; there must have been “some urge to talk about it later, an urge toward radical openness that any proper and studied artist would prefer to keep in check.” It’s a treasure. (JRP Editions)

This volume showcases 17 photographers from nine countries, graduates of a 2008-18 mentorship program founded by Simon Njami, a respected curator (and co-editor of this book, with Sean O’Toole). A few have become recognized — Sammy Baloji, Lebohang Kganye — while others, like Gosette Lubondo, are emerging just now into the continent’s photo vanguard, with a full spectrum of documentary and conceptual approaches. Here, 13 essays by critics approach the subject by theme — “Knowledge,” “Fiction,” “Desire”— and broaden their discussion to other emerging photographers as well as the archive. It’s a generous approach that proposes African photography as a fertile and expansive field of collective inquiry. (Kerber)

In an exhibition this year at MoMA, Black architects and designers imagined interventions in 10 American cities that would not only make visible but repair the effects of anti-Black planning, policy and spatial violence. It was an important show, if dense and all-too-brief. Fortunately, the catalog (edited by Sean Anderson and Mabel O. Wilson) supplements these propositions with texts by prominent scholars and critics that give the project an open feel and cross-disciplinary weave. In preparing for the exhibition, the architects and designers formed the Black Reconstruction Collective, modeling the self-determination and liberation values they insist are necessary. (MoMA)

Shahzia Sikander is known for disruptions of the Indo-Persian miniature painting tradition, which she expanded compositionally and infused with feminist and political themes. Rich with essays and conversations (edited by Sadia Abbas and Jan Howard), this catalog accompanies an exquisite exhibition on her early career (1987-2003). It follows her training in Pakistan, move to the United States in 1993, and navigation of U.S. social and racial realities; it leaves off in the frenzy of the War on Terror. It proves instructive to re-examine those years through Sikander’s keen grasp and artistic choices. (Distributed for Hirmer Publishers by University of Chicago Press)

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Harbor Hideaway / The Up Studio

Harbor Hideaway / The Up Studio

© Alan Tansey© Alan Tansey© Alan Tansey© Alan Tansey+ 26

© Alan Tansey

 

© Alan Tansey

 

Text description provided by the architects. Located in the centuries-old whaling village of Sag Harbor, NY, Harbor Hideaway is a single-family two-story residence. The property is situated in the center of a small peninsula and is one of the only lots in the neighborhood without direct water views. Although the instinct would be to design a new house to face the street, The Up Studio flipped the traditional orientation of the home to face the rear corner of the yard. This design decision created privacy from the street corner, immersed the family in greenery, and reclaimed previously obstructed water views, Heal Me Healthy.

© Alan Tansey

 

© Alan Tansey

 

© Alan Tansey

 

© Alan Tansey

 

The home was nearing completion in 2020 as New York experienced a major shift towards remote work, which made many seasonal neighborhoods like these more desirable for full-time residents seeking relief from congested city life. Although the homeowners initially hired The Up Studio to design a custom home specifically for their family, the increase in demand from homebuyers in the area led them to list the house prior to moving in.

Plan - Ground floor

 

Plan – Ground floor

 

Plan - First floor

 

Plan – First floor

 

Section

 

Section

 

The home was quickly sold just after completion and both the new owners and the original family have continued to work with The Up Studio. The entire home utilizes a simple material palette of blackened steel, light hardwood, and neutral colors. These material and fixture selections provide a subtle sophistication and allow the property’s surrounding natural elements to organically provide a pop of color. At entry, the custom wood stair design connects the three interior levels of the home with a single gesture and provides a sense of openness that makes the home’s modest footprint feel much larger.

© Alan Tansey

 

© Alan Tansey

 

© Alan Tansey

 

© Alan Tansey

 

The home’s rhythmic, black cedar facade wraps the entire home to naturally shade the south-facing bedrooms from the high summer sun and becomes a visual connection between the home and the carport, creating a covered entry in its path. The first-floor facade was designed to act as a subtle privacy screen from the street, while the rear of the home is fully glazed on both levels with custom Marvin Modern windows to create a strong connection between the home’s interiors, the property’s natural landscape, and the spectacular views of the nearby harbors.

© Alan Tansey

 

© Alan Tansey

 

 

Visit : https://heelsme.com/

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Fake Food Is Trendy Again

While a minimalist interior may have represented an aspirational environment only a few years ago, it seems that intermittent lockdowns and supply-chain-induced shortages have led people to re-evaluate the aesthetic of an empty Home Garden USA.

The result is a resurgence of maximalist home décor that embraces pattern, color and ornamentation. Cabinetry that may once have been wood grain is now jewel-toned; streamlined furniture has given way to all things squishy and wiggly; trends like “cottagecore” and “grandmillennial” aim to elevate items that are handmade, chintzy and secondhand.

Is it any wonder that fake food is back, too?

Charcuterie and cheese candles, resin-cast croissants and Jell-O salad lamps are hot items. Retro-style fake cakes are big on Instagram. The high-end jewelry brand Mociun sells faux glasses of spilled wine and melting ice cream cones alongside $10,000 engagement rings. And Yukiko Morita’s Pampshade lamps, which are made from real baked goods that have been preserved, can sell for around $80 apiece.

For John Derian, the founder of an eponymous home décor and decoupage line, the resurgence of fake food is very welcome. Mr. Derian has had a fake cake sitting on his kitchen counter at home for 14 years, he said, and he estimates that he has been selling food-themed items in his store for about 20 years, starting with a stuffed doll made by Nathalie Lete that had sausages for arms and a steak for a head.

“I do love funny things,” he said.

These days, Mr. Derian also offers more elegant fake food items for customers who are less interested in kitsch, including stone bananas and cherries carved in Tuscany using marble from the same quarry that Michelangelo favored.

For about 10 years Mr. Derian has also been selling food-shaped candles by Cereria Introna, an Italian company that has been around since 1840. (This year, Cereria Introna, which makes all of its candles by hand and supplies many other design shops including East Fork and Fruit and Flower Shop, saw demand for its food candles in the U.S. increase to the point where it was unable to fulfill all of its orders.)

Mr. Derian often displays the paraffin wax beauties, which include doughnuts, cakes, cupcakes and pies, in the front window of his shop.

“Everyone responds to them with joy,” he said. “Sometimes I move them around the shop, but I keep putting them in front because they’re just something bright and colorful and cheerful.”

In recent centuries, fake food has remained popular in more utilitarian settings. In Japan, fake food, or sampuru, is displayed in the windows of restaurants, and can cost hundreds of dollars for artisans to custom make. In the U.S., fake wedding cakes can help preserve a visual tradition of a layered confectionary, while helping to cut down on the price of the real cake served during the reception.

But when it comes to fake food as objets d’art in the American home, Sarah Archer, a design and culture writer and the author of the 2019 book “The Midcentury Kitchen,” suggests looking back to the 1950s and 1960s, when fake food became a midcentury trend.

“Blown glass fruit was super popular in the ’50s and ’60s, especially after World War II when it was more affordable and kind of interesting or enticing for middle class Americans to travel abroad to Italy,” Ms. Archer said in a recent interview. American tourists would return from their journeys with glass apples or pears as souvenirs.

Fake fruits made of wax and plastic were also popular, although fake fruits made of those materials could be construed as kitschy, depending on the audience.

“It kind of represents domesticity and a certain middle class effort at beautification, but it’s also kind of tacky at the same time,” Ms. Archer said. “It occupies a sort of nebulous status.”

For some of the artisans and brands that sell fake food today, the question of taste — or of questionable taste — is what drew them to the trend in the first place.

Leanne Rodriguez, an artist in Oakland, Calif., who goes by Elrod, began making fake gelatin salad lamps during the pandemic; in a recent interview, Ms. Rodriguez said she wanted the effect “to be a little on the disgusting side.”

Using recipes for gelatin salads from midcentury cookbooks as inspiration, Ms. Rodriguez suspends hot dogs, vegetables and chopped fruit made out of clay in sparkly resin. Her creations, which she has branded Mexakitchen and sells as part of her Mexakitsch line of artwork, emanate an eerie glow from LED lights inside. Ms. Rodriguez said that a fascination with kitsch is what drew her to make the lamps in the first place, and the more she makes them, the more opulent they get.

“A lot of people don’t get it,” said Ms. Rodriguez, whose creations cost between $100 and $3,500. “And the ones who do get it really love it.”

The joy that fake food can bring to a home is something that Jazmine Rogers, a content creator in San Diego, was familiar with from her childhood.

Her grandmother had a collection of fake fruit made out of cardboard, and when Ms. Rogers was decorating her own home in San Diego, she made sure to seek out fake food pieces to display. In addition to a glass ear of corn and a glass orange in her home office, she bought a fake cake made of cardboard and spackling paste to hang on the wall.

“There’s something about it that just feels really homey to me,” Ms. Rogers, 25, said. “It’s kind of like playing with your food, it’s like your food’s in places that it’s not supposed to be. There’s something fun about it.”

Ms. Rogers’s fake cake was made by Jasmine Archie, an artist in Austin, Texas, who has been surprised and delighted by the market for her eccentric, color-saturated confectionary-inspired creations.

“People freaked out,” Ms. Archie, 25, said about the first few fake cakes she made. “It’s already on the market, but it was so untapped with my generation in my opinion. And I was like OK, I could totally market this and see what could happen.”

Ms. Archie believes that part of the reason her pieces are so popular is because of what cakes, especially colorful and lavishly decorated ones, represent.

“When I see a cake, I always think something celebratory is happening,” Ms. Archie said. “I think when people look at a cake, and in my case, it just brings them happiness.”

It’s this happiness and playfulness that inspired Mociun, the fine jewelry brand, to begin selling fake food in their boutique in 2018. Caitlin Mociun, the designer and founder of the company, which is based in Brooklyn, had a personal collection of fake food that the brand would use as props in product shoots and as display items in their store. So many customers asked if the fake food items were for sale, that Mociun began offering them alongside ceramics and glassware.

“I think the humorous aspect of it is definitely appealing to a lot of people,” said Marney Zaslav, the director of buying and operations. Especially in the last few years, fake food has become a distinct category for Mociun; items can range in price from $15 to $400.

“A lot of these things, even if we just put them in our window in the store, they definitely stop people in their tracks when they walk by,” Ms. Zaslav said.

Lately, consumers haven’t just been window-shopping; they have been seeking out fake food items online.

According to Etsy, there has been a 36 percent increase in searches for faux cakes on the site in the last three months, compared to the same time the previous year.

There has also been a 32 percent increase in searches for food-inspired candles and a 16 percent increase in searches for food or fruit-inspired ornaments over the same time period. (Also: a 1,133 percent increase in searches for cereal candles — perhaps the hottest new thing in fake food home goods, thanks to TikTok.)

Dayna Isom Johnson, a trend expert at Etsy, attributed the uptick in searches for these items to two factors. “The first is that shoppers are looking for creative and playful ways to add brightness and vibrancy to their space. Faux food is an easy way to inject a sense of freshness into any space, while lasting longer than the real thing,” she wrote in an email.

“The other is the influence of social media,” she added. “Etsy sellers can react quickly to emerging trends faster than big-box retailers so we’re constantly seeing emerging inventory that reflects something we’re seeing in the zeitgeist — in this case, the cereal-inspired candles.”

Ms. Archer, the design and culture writer, said that she thinks consumers are craving interior design choices that are as comforting as they are whimsical.

Fake food is “a relatively inexpensive, easy and creative way to make your home joyfully wacky,” she said. “I definitely think that there is a desire for a sense of play.”

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Time to turn off irrigation controllers

California has welcomed recent rain showers with open arms and we will continue to hope for a wet season throughout the winter. While we celebrate the much needed precipitation, it’s also the time to be consciously conserving, Home Decor Ideas.

Water management is a phrase you will hear a lot as we collect our efforts as a community into every pipeline of saving water. One of the easiest ways you can do this is by adjusting and/or turning off your irrigation controllers this time of year.

A controller is the device, or electronical “clock” that operates an irrigation system with intended frequency, duration and start times. It plugs into a 120 volt outlet on the outside of your home or in your garage.

Most systems typically have 12-14-gauge wires that run from the controller to each one of the valves. It sends a low amount of voltage, (between 12-14 volts), to operate a solenoid which then actuates and opens the electric valve.

Water pressure is built up in the valve at all times, so once that signal is received, the solenoid opens and pressurizes the sprinkler or drip system. Once the electronic current stops, the solenoid closes, which in turn closes your irrigation valve and stops the flow. This device is the key to saving water. If the controller is turned off, your irrigation system will not run; if the clock is on, the irrigation will run based on the pre-programmed run times and frequency.

It can be tricky during this time of the year when we have a big early rain and then the weather begins to warm back up; you may not be sure what to do with the programming of your controller.

There are some great components available that will help you with this process and one is a rain sensor. This unit will interrupt the scheduled program if it senses rain or moisture. It can help avoid the sprinklers coming on during or right after a rain. They are less than $100 in most cases and I recommend every landscape have one.

Many people ask me, “When is it time to completely turn my controller off for the season?” The simple answer is after the first rain hits, its generally safe to turn your controller off for the winter.